Herding CATs @ CHI 2026

Workshop Overview

Prior analyses of creative activity traces, including a creative sensemaking curve (A); a visualization of trajectories through a design space (B); a fuzzy linkograph (C); and an analysis of version control commit histories (D).

Herding CATs: Making Sense of Creative Activity Traces is a CHI 2026 workshop that aims to advance the analysis of creative activity traces, particularly those captured through user interaction with software creativity support tools (CSTs). Traces of creative activity constitute a rich resource for identifying the impacts of CSTs—especially AI-based CSTs—on the creative process, and may also inform general-purpose process theories of creativity. Several new approaches to making sense of these traces have been introduced in the past few years, but many of these approaches have emerged from largely disjoint research communities, hindering the development of a shared analytical toolkit. We propose to gather HCI and creativity researchers, including proponents of several different trace analysis techniques, to sketch out a technique design space to guide future empirically grounded research on creativity support.

Participation

Participation in the workshop is open to both experienced and emerging creativity researchers, including core HCI researchers, those in relevant AI subfields (e.g., computational creativity and game AI) and creative scholar-practitioners. To attend, participants must submit a position paper of 2-4 pages in single-column ACM format (excluding references). Papers should describe a research question, direction, argument, or proposal related to creative activity traces.

Position papers should be submitted via our Google form.

Participants are encouraged to upload their accepted position papers to arXiv. Accepted submissions will also be made available via the workshop website. At least one author per accepted submission must attend the workshop in person.

For accessibility requirements, please contact access@chi2026.acm.org and note your needs on the conference registration form.

Timeline

Organizers