Launch of Beyond the AI Binary: A Conversation on Creativity, Future Practice and Change
Join us for the launch of Beyond the AI Binary, a new chapbook exploring the evolving relationship between AI and creative practice.
The chapbook draws on a series of workshops with freelancers, students and early-career practitioners, in-house creative professionals, and creative managers. Together, we explored the challenges of adopting AI in creative work, the skills that may become increasingly important, and the different futures that AI might contribute to.
The evening will feature a roundtable discussion in which we will explore different perspectives on creativity and technology and consider what responsible engagement with AI might mean for creative practice and creative communities.
The event will include opportunities to explore the chapbook, share experiences and perspectives, and reflect on how AI might shape—and be shaped by—creative practice through participatory activities.
The event is open to creative practitioners, students, educators, cultural and creative organisations, and anyone interested in how AI is changing the ways we make, work and imagine the future.
Refreshments and copies of the chapbook will be available at the event.
EVENT DETAILS
You can read more about this study in this open access pictorial: Pushpi Bagchi, Caterina Moruzzi, Charlotte Bird, Kam Chan, Billy Dixon, Laura Mariah Herman, Kyle Morrison, Aulia Ardista Wiradarmo, and Yu Wang. 2026. Mapping Imaginaries: A Futures Workshop for Creative Practices with Generative AI. In Proceedings of the 2026 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1623–1637. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3812784
Read more about CREA-TEC: https://www.createcresearch.org
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSANTS
Caterina Moruzzi (roundtable chair)
Dr Caterina Moruzzi is a Chancellor’s Fellow in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, working at the intersection of AI, creativity, and cultural practice. With a background in philosophy and music, her research examines the ethical, cultural, and practical implications of AI in creative work, with a particular focus on how generative systems and algorithmic curation reshape creative agency, authorship, and authenticity. Caterina is a BRAID Fellow leading CREA-TEC: Cultivating Responsible Engagement with AI Technology to Empower Creatives (in collaboration with Adobe) and founded the Edinburgh Futures Institute cluster Creativity, AI, and the Human, a 130+ member network spanning academia, industry, and the third sector. Her work has featured on the BBC and been covered in Science and Nature.
Pushpi Bagchi
Dr Pushpi Bagchi is a visual communication designer and researcher dedicated to leveraging design as a tool for social innovation. As the Principal Designer of Innovation Services, she champions co-creation through design and futures-focused methodologies to facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations with partners across EFI’s ecosystem. Pushpi holds a PhD in Design and an MA in Graphic Design from the University of Edinburgh. Her expertise spans visual communication, human-centred design, participatory methodologies, and critical theory. She has worked in various roles in the education, creative, and third sectors across Sri Lanka, India, and the United Kingdom. Her research explores participatory and systems design, pluriversality and transnationalism. She is particularly interested in how the nuances of cultural context create frictions that challenge notions of universality.
Chris Day
Chris Day is an illustrator and animator with over 25years experience creating custom graphics for education, promotion or just plain fun. With clients such as Amazon, Diageo, Waitrose, the UN and many of the country’s top Universities, he works in a wide variety of styles and formats, from clean, digital infographics to filthy, hand-drawn sketches. Whether promoting a start-up, drawing at an event or adding colour to academic research, he is passionate about making content more engaging, entertaining and memorable (and has the ink stains to prove it).
Kimia Witte
Dr Kimia Witte is a cell engineer, artist and curator working across science and art. They are a Chancellor’s Fellow and Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Strathclyde, where their research investigates how geometry and mechanical information shape cellular behaviour and collective biological organisation. Alongside their academic practice, they are a trustee of Transmission Gallery in Glasgow, contributing to its artistic programme and development as an artist-led experimental space. Their broader work explores organisation, computation, agency and representation across living systems, using science and art as different ways of asking what living systems are and how they organise.
Ji Yoon Lee
Ji Yoon Lee is a South Korean artist based in Edinburgh. She explores how digital technologies shape our relationship with the world and our embodied experiences, translating the sensory dimensions of these encounters into visual form. She holds an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art and is a studio holder at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. In 2023, she was invited as a guest artist for the GoMA Youth Group’s summer programme at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. Her recent exhibitions include Sweet Liberation (Mote 102, Edinburgh, 2026), The Thread That Pulls (Royal Scottish Academy, 2025), and Time, Touch, Tactility (Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, 2025).
This work was developed as part of CREA-TEC: Cultivating Responsible Engagement with AI Technology to Empower Creatives, a Bridging Responsible AI (BRAID) fellowship project supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) [AH/X007146/F], in collaboration with Adobe. The project was co-designed and delivered in partnership with the Futures and Design Team of the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
