Explorations of Huayao embroidery and Generative AI

Generative AI (GenAI) offers opportunities to preserve and more widely share Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), whilst at the same time bringing risks of misrepresenting, misappropriating, homogenizing, and devaluing ICH.

To explore these tensions we collaborated in 2025 with ten embroiderers in a rural village in Hunan, China, building four Generative Al models and three workflows from a curated dataset of Huayao embroidery images. In our fieldwork the embroiderers used these workflows to create design sketches and transform them by hand into embroidered pieces. Through this co-creative process, we examined how Generative Al might support traditional artisans and assessed its potential and limitations for preserving and renewing intangible cultural heritage.

Bryan-Kinns, N., Zhang, D., Li, H., He, M., Yuan, X., Xin, Z., Pavlov, I., Yang, Y., & Wang, S. (2026). Generative AI and the Embodied Embroidery of Huayao Intangible Cultural Heritage. In Proceedings of ACM Creativity and Cognition conference 2026. ACM.

Li, H., Zhang, D., Chen, S., & Bryan-Kinns, N. (2026). The In-situ AI Pattern Merchant: A Speculative Intervention in Huayao Embroidery Futures. In Proceedings of DRS 2026. Design Research Society.

Yuan, X., Yuan, X., Wang, S., Li, H., He, M., Zhang, D., & Bryan-Kinns, N. (2026). Toward a Culturally Situated Perspective: Rethinking the Role of AI in Intangible Cultural Heritage Pattern Creation. In Proceedings of DRS 2026. Design Research Society.

Bryan-Kinns, N., Zhang, D., Li, H., He, M., Yuan, X., Xin, Z., Pavlov, I., Yang, Y., & Wang, S. (2026). Preliminary Explorations of Generative AI and the Embodied Embroidery of Huayao Intangible Cultural Heritage. In Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI 2026. ACM.