Hi, I’m Qian Wan, 萬騫.

I’m a Research Fellow at SWEET Lab, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, supervised by Professor Renwen Zhang. I completed my PhD at the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, supervised by Professor Yuhan Luo, and Professor Zhicong Lu. My name is pronounced as Wan Qian (Wan Chi-an) in Mandarin, which I know can be tricky. Feel free to use my Cantonese nickname: Ahin (ɑː’hiːn).

My current research explores the intersection between creativity support, human-AI collaboration, and social computing. Specifically, I seek to understand the anthropomorphized cognitive role of GenAI in the creative thinking process, unravel downstream implications of co-creative activities in personal informatics, and design new paradigms and workflows to support human-GenAI collaboration.

Besides HCI research, I love reading philosophy.

Selected publications

Through the design of Polymind, we explored the potential of parallel collaboration with multiple mixed initiative agents on a visual diagramming canvas. To operationalize parallel collaboration, we borrowed design metaphors from groupware such as microtasks.

Metamorpheus is an affective interface that engages users in a metaphorical dream narration for affective mindfulness and self-reflection. Our evaluation found the co-creation of metaphorical visual stories helped articulate ineffable emotions, created a sense of connnectedness between creators, and motivated dream sharing.

In an empirical study with 15 participants, we identified three theoretically-grounded stages of co-creativity during prewriting with GPT-3.