Early Explorations at the Intersection of Clay, AI, and Embodied Making

• doi:10.1145/3803784.3816835

Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Creativity and Cognition

This poster presents a pilot study exploring the relationship between clay and AI, as both a making material and a design method. Drawing on aspects of research through design, clay and a short set of prompts were distributed to participants to engage with in their own time and space. They articulated their experience with clay in relation to AI: asking AI what to make, comparing AI-suggested objects with self-directed ones, and exploring whether there are meaningful parallels between working with clay and working with AI. Early findings suggest themes around AI and legibility, the gap between AI pattern recognition and human making intention, and broader themes around posture, attention and clay as emotional regulator. The work invites a perspective around Creativity for Change, offering some early insights in to how embodied making practices together with AI can open new possibilities for creative participation.