Supporting Fast Design: The Potential of Hackathons for Co-Creative Systems

In this paper, we argue for the potential and relevance of modelling novel AI co-creative systems after key aspects which characterises the specific kind of design processes unfolding in hackathons. There has recently been an increased interest into the potentials and challenges of creative collaborations between humans and AI, however, there have not been many practical implementations of co-creative systems. We argue that by designing co-creative systems to support the specific kind of creative design work in hackathons, valuable contributions can be made in the context of an overlooked aspect in interaction design; how to support fast design thinking. The specificity of hackathon participation involves high demands for fast idea generation, decision-making, and prototyping, which ideally ends in a functioning and novel prototype. Specifically, we identify three key characteristics of hackathon participation, and for each characteristic we discuss how they may model Human-AI interaction in the context of co-creative systems for fast design thinking. The contribution of this paper is to provide future research on co-creative systems with inspiration grounded in the parallels between aspects of AI and key characteristics of hackathon participation.