Intelligence emerges between participants.
Meaning and creative direction are jointly enacted through coordinated participation, response, and mutual transformation.
Nicholas Davis, PhD · Human-Centered Computing
Understanding intelligence as something that unfolds through interaction.
I develop theories, analytical methods, and interactive systems for understanding how humans and artificial agents create, adapt, regulate, and construct meaning together through time.
Draw with me
Make a line, curve, or small shape. The AI will respond after each stroke.
Human–AI Coupling
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Drift
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Coherence
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Interactive enactive drawing partner
AI contribution
Interaction is not merely a channel through which intelligence passes. It is part of the intelligence.
Interaction must be studied as a process.
Collaboration unfolds through phases, transitions, recurrences, and reorganizations that cannot be reduced to final outputs.
Cognition is sustained through regulation.
Adaptive systems maintain meaningful coupling by balancing stability and change as goals, contexts, and environments drift.
Dynamic organization leaves traces.
Interaction traces can be transformed into states, trajectories, events, and higher-order models of cognitive organization.
The research program
Four interconnected pillars
This program brings theory, empirical analysis, and system building together to investigate intelligence as temporally organized participation.
I
Human–AI Co-Creation
How humans and computational agents improvise, negotiate direction, and construct creative meaning together.
Relational creativityII
Interaction Dynamics
How initiative, rhythm, uptake, coherence, drift, and regulation change during extended collaboration.
Temporal processIII
Enactive Intelligence
How artificial systems can participate adaptively without being reduced to generators, predictors, or optimizers.
Adaptive participationIV
Cognitive Trajectories
How interaction traces can become cognitively meaningful representations of evolving organization through time.
Theory + measurementResearch lineage
Fifteen years of research on creativity, interaction, and AI
The current theoretical program emerged through a sustained sequence of studies, systems, and conceptual refinements rather than a single project.
2011—2013
Distributed Creativity and Creativity Support
Early work examined creative cognition across people, representations, and tools, including digital filmmaking, perceptive sketching, and novice-oriented creativity support.
Distributed cognitionPerceptual LogicCreativity support
2014—2016
Artistic Computer Colleagues and Enaction
The Drawing Apprentice and Enactive Model of Creativity reframed computational partners as participants in unfolding interaction rather than tools that produce isolated outputs.
Drawing ApprenticeEnactionParticipatory sense-making
2017—2019
Quantified Co-Creation
Creative Sense-Making and interaction-centered metrics made temporal patterns of collaboration empirically visible, including turn-taking, novelty, convergence, and conceptual shifts.
Creative Sense-MakingInteraction metricsConceptual shifts
2020—2025
Enactive and Hybrid Intelligence
The Five Pillars of Enaction and Co-Creative Design Framework extended these ideas into broader theories for designing participatory and explainable hybrid-intelligence systems.
Five PillarsHybrid intelligenceHuman-centered AI
2026—
Interaction-Centered Intelligence and Cognitive Trajectories
Current work integrates interaction-centered intelligence, Cognitive Trajectory Modeling, enactive regulation, Aether, and the Cognitive Trajectory Laboratory into a unified research ecosystem.
ICICTMEnactive regulationTrajectory laboratory
Selected contributions
A connected body of theory, method, and systems
Each contribution addresses a different level of the same problem: how to understand and design intelligence that emerges through evolving interaction.
Interaction-Centered Intelligence
A reframing of intelligence around the evolving organization of interaction rather than the isolated capabilities of an individual agent.
Cognitive Trajectory Modeling
A framework for transforming temporal interaction traces into cognitively grounded trajectories, properties, events, and interpretive structures.
Creative Sense-Making
A framework for analyzing co-creation as a temporally extended process of opening, stabilization, negotiation, and reorganization.
Enactive Model of Creativity
A foundational account of how computational systems can improvise as artistic colleagues through embodied, situated, and participatory interaction.
Cognitive Trajectory Laboratory
An instrumented drawing environment that translates process traces into states, trajectories, properties, events, chapters, and research reports.
Aether
An enactive drawing AI that regulates its participation in response to emerging interaction dynamics rather than generating finished images on demand.
The Co-Creative Design Framework for Hybrid Intelligence
A design framework for hybrid-intelligence systems that foregrounds co-creative participation, complementarity, interaction, and shared adaptation.
Enaction as a Theory for Co-Creative AI
An enactive account of co-creative artificial intelligence grounded in embodied action, autonomy, emergence, experience, and participatory sense-making.
Co-Creation as a Paradigm for Human–AI Interaction
A broad framing of co-creation as a foundational paradigm for understanding and designing collaborative relationships between humans and artificial agents.
Co-Creative Sense-Making
A framework for understanding co-creation as a dynamic process in which people and artificial agents jointly negotiate meaning, direction, and creative possibilities.
Quantified and Explainable Co-Creative AI
A methodological approach to making co-creative interaction measurable and interpretable through interaction dynamics, temporal analysis, and explainable representations.
Toward a Cognitive Theory of Creativity Support
A cognitively grounded account of how interactive systems can support creative work by shaping perception, interpretation, action, and the evolving organization of the creative process.
Selected systems
Working instruments for studying living cognition
The systems are not demonstrations appended to the theory. They are experimental environments in which theoretical commitments become observable, testable, and revisable.
01Aether
Enactive drawing AI for adaptive, real-time creative participation.↗
02Cognitive Trajectory Laboratory
Process-oriented drawing, measurement, replay, and reporting environment.↗
03AI Drawing Partner
Dialogic drawing system grounded in co-creative sense-making.↗
04Emergence Machine
Online-adaptive architecture that detects drift and reorganizes learning.↗
05Participatory Stroke Engine
Visual-language-model participation through context-sensitive next strokes.↗
06Multi-Agent Drawing Environment
Distributed drawing platform for studying emergent collective organization.↗
Additional historical and applied prototypes remain available in the complete research archive.
Selected publications
Key works across the research lineage
A curated entry point into the theoretical, empirical, and systems contributions. Expand an item for its significance and source links.
Develops a framework for designing hybrid-intelligence systems around co-creative participation, complementarity, interaction, and shared adaptation.
Translates core commitments of enactive cognition into a structured framework for conceptualizing and designing co-creative artificial intelligence.
Advances quantitative analysis of human–AI creative interaction by focusing on evolving collaborative dynamics rather than evaluating only the completed artifact.
Provides empirical evidence for participatory sense-making in interaction with a co-creative drawing agent and establishes a foundation for later temporal modeling.
Introduces the Enactive Model of Creativity and positions computational systems as artistic colleagues that participate in an unfolding creative process.
Develops a cognitively grounded account of how interactive systems can support creative work, connecting perception, interpretation, and action.
Examines creative cognition as distributed across collaborators, tools, representations, and production practices in digital filmmaking.
Researcher, theorist, and builder
My work connects cognitive theory, human–computer interaction, and working AI systems to study how intelligence remains coherent as interaction changes.
Nicholas Davis received his PhD in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech, specializing in cognitive science and computational creativity. He served as an Assistant Professor of Human–Computer Interaction at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he taught human-centered design and co-creative AI while conducting research on the design and evaluation of human–AI creative systems.
During his doctoral training, he worked in Georgia Tech’s Expressive Machinery Lab, Entertainment Intelligence Lab, and ACME Lab. His industry research experience includes Google, YouTube’s Visioning Team, and Adobe’s Creative Technologies Lab. He currently works as an independent researcher and consultant studying and designing interactive AI systems.
Georgia Tech
UNC Charlotte
Google
YouTube
Adobe
PhDHuman-Centered Computing
15+ yearsComputational creativity research
Theory + systemsIntegrated research methodology
IndependentResearch and consulting
Research ecosystem
Connected sites, distinct scholarly roles
This personal site serves as the canonical scholarly hub, connecting the broader research program to focused theoretical and applied environments.
01 · Scholarly field
Interaction Science
The conceptual home for studying how cognition, creativity, and intelligence emerge through interaction over time.
Visit site ↗ 02 · Research instituteInteraction Science Institute
The institutional hub for the field, its research program, methods, systems, and emerging scholarly community.
Visit site ↗ 03 · Research programEnactive AI
Theories, prototypes, publications, and consulting for participatory and interaction-centered artificial intelligence.
Visit site ↗ 04 · Adaptive architectureEmergence Machine
An experimental architecture for detecting drift, regulating adaptation, and sustaining coherence in changing environments.
Visit site ↗ 05 · Temporal instrumentKalyri’el Scope
An open platform for discovering, interpreting, and sharing temporal patterns, motifs, regimes, and trajectories.
Visit site ↗ 06 · Applied programEnactive Art Therapy
Process-oriented theory and instrumentation for modeling creative engagement and therapeutic change.
Visit site ↗ 07 · Cognitive foundationCreative Sense-Making
The cognitive and methodological foundation for analyzing co-creative interaction as an unfolding process.
Visit site ↗ 08 · Co-creative AICo-Creative AI
A focused entry point for human–AI co-creation, collaborative intelligence, and the design of creative AI partners.
Visit site ↗Research · Collaboration · Consulting
Building more participatory forms of artificial intelligence.
I collaborate on research, theory development, interactive system design, evaluation, and strategic applications of co-creative and enactive AI.
Contact Nicholas Davis ↗