TY - GEN
T1 - Creativity in the BioFoundry
T2 - 18th ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference, C and C 2026
AU - Tian, Mingyan
AU - Sterman, Sarah
N1 - This work was supported by the iBioFoundry: A research center supported by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant No. [2400058].We would like to thank all the interview participants for their time and insights.We are grateful to Huimin Zhao, George Heintz, Claudia Lutz, Nilmani Singh, Stephan Lane, Junyu Chen, Jingxia Lu, David Bianchi and members of the UIUC iBioFoundry for their support. We also thank members of the PICL lab for their valuable feedback.
PY - 2026/7/13
Y1 - 2026/7/13
N2 - Biofoundries automate biological experimentation at unprecedented scale, promising speed, reproducibility, and access. Yet automation also reshapes how scientists experience experimentation and creativity. Through in-depth interviews with nine scientists and experts across academia and industry (including biofoundry developers, automation engineers, and end-users), we examine how scientific creativity is enacted under automation. Biofoundries displace sensory cues, redistribute responsibility between humans and machines, and transform troubleshooting from an embodied, local practice into a predictive, social, and interpretive one. Rather than framing biofoundries as automation factories, we argue that they should be understood as Creativity Support Tools, whose design directly shapes how researchers notice breakdowns, exercise judgment, learn from failure, and progress through success. By connecting biofoundry practice with prior HCI work on automation, debugging, and distributed creativity, this paper demonstrates biofoundries as a distinctive and timely site for creativity research in science.
AB - Biofoundries automate biological experimentation at unprecedented scale, promising speed, reproducibility, and access. Yet automation also reshapes how scientists experience experimentation and creativity. Through in-depth interviews with nine scientists and experts across academia and industry (including biofoundry developers, automation engineers, and end-users), we examine how scientific creativity is enacted under automation. Biofoundries displace sensory cues, redistribute responsibility between humans and machines, and transform troubleshooting from an embodied, local practice into a predictive, social, and interpretive one. Rather than framing biofoundries as automation factories, we argue that they should be understood as Creativity Support Tools, whose design directly shapes how researchers notice breakdowns, exercise judgment, learn from failure, and progress through success. By connecting biofoundry practice with prior HCI work on automation, debugging, and distributed creativity, this paper demonstrates biofoundries as a distinctive and timely site for creativity research in science.
KW - automation
KW - biofoundries
KW - creativity support tools
KW - scientific creativity
KW - synthetic biology
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105045847116
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105045847116#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1145/3803784.3807549
DO - 10.1145/3803784.3807549
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105045847116
T3 - C and C 2026 - Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Creativity and Cognition
SP - 316
EP - 328
BT - C and C 2026 - Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Creativity and Cognition
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 13 July 2026 through 16 July 2026
ER -