Human-Centered AI Workshop @ AIGA SF
Designing for Belonging: Analog + AI
Human-Centered Creativity Workshop at Adobe with AIGA SF
How can analog creativity and artificial intelligence work together to deepen human connection?
Designing for Belonging is an interactive workshop created by Yiying Lu that combines analog drawing, storytelling, and generative AI to explore identity, connection, and community. Developed and refined over nearly 9 years through workshops with diverse communities, including IDEO, Airbnb, Dropbox, Apple, and Stanford University, it puts human creativity at the heart of the experience.
Presented with AIGA San Francisco at Adobe San Francisco, this latest edition brought together more than 50 creatives to transform personal reflections into shared creative expression using Adobe Express and Adobe Firefly.
At the heart of the experience is a simple principle:
Analog first. AI second. Human experience throughout.
The workshop begins with the story behind Yiying’s creation of the Unicode Dumpling Emoji 🥟, exploring how a seemingly simple visual symbol can carry culture, emotion, identity, and meaning across languages and borders.
Participants then use Sharpies and paper to draw themselves as dumplings in a personal moment of non-belonging. Through guided storytelling and group sharing, individual experiences begin to reveal unexpected common ground across cultures and backgrounds.
Once participants have captured their story by hand, AI becomes part of the process. They use their own drawings as reference images in tools like Adobe Firefly and Adobe Express, experimenting with generative technology to transform moments of isolation into new visual stories of connection and belonging.
AI doesn’t replace the human work. It builds on the drawing, helping people see their own stories in a new way.
When I invited Mahdiah onstage to try Adobe Firefly for the first time, we uploaded her sketch as a reference image. Inspired by Spider-Man: Far From Home, she asked Firefly to make it colorful, keep the central dumpling in a hijab, and show her family waving and saying goodbye.
To create the image, we used Google Gemini 3.1 (Nano Banana 2), available through Adobe Firefly’s partner models, with Mahdiah’s original drawing as the reference image and her own words guiding the prompt.
The AI preserved Mahdiah’s hand-drawn typography, colored it in Spider-Man-inspired red and blue, and seamlessly added spiderwebs. It enriched her sketch with detailed illustrations of the road, house, Statue of Liberty, passport, and suitcase. When she noticed that AI had even added a speech bubble with her family saying goodbye in Bengali, she exclaimed, “This is Bengali too. Wow!”
The audience applauded the transformation.
I then invited participants to imagine themselves as their favorite dumpling and illustrate a personal moment of belonging using Sharpies. They would later use their sketches as reference images in Adobe Firefly to bring their stories to life.
To continue Mahdiah’s story from non-belonging to belonging, I invited her to create a second sketch. Mahdiah drew the opposite of arriving in a new country alone: herself surrounded by the friends she had found in the U.S. As she explained during the workshop, she had met people from many different places who became her community and gave her a new sense of belonging: “Those are my friends, and that makes me feel like home.”
Mahdiah returned to the stage and revised her earlier prompt, transforming her belonging sketch into Feels Like Home, a vibrant, Spider-Man-inspired scene celebrating friendship and diversity. Delighted by the result, especially her Spider-Man-inspired hijab, she exclaimed, “I love it!”
Mahdiah used her original belonging sketch and her own prompt; we generated the image through Adobe Firefly’s partner models, transforming her drawing into a vibrant celebration of friendship and belonging.
We then used Mahdiah’s two AI-generated artworks as the opening and closing frames in Adobe Firefly, using the Google Veo 3.1 model to create an eight-second animation.
The video brought her journey from non-belonging to belonging to life, moving from leaving Bangladesh alone to finding a new sense of home. Click below to view:
When it played onstage, Mahdiah and the audience reacted with surprise and delight, bringing her personal story full circle
After Mahdiah’s demo, I invited participants onstage to share their own journeys from non-belonging to belonging. They showcased how their hand-drawn sketches had transformed into colorful AI-generated artwork and animations. The results were funny, nostalgic, heartwarming, and occasionally bizarre! Each story revealed how AI can build on personal memories and human creativity, helping us see our own experiences in new ways rather than replacing them.
At the end of the workshop, participants shared their experiences through a live, one-word reflection. “Fun” emerged as the most prominent response, alongside playful, connected, alive, curious, relieved, and mind-boggling.
The workshop’s average self-reported energy level rose from:
6.2 / 10 at check-in → 9.1 / 10 at check-out
The responses reflect how analog drawing, personal storytelling, and AI-powered creativity can bring people together, transforming individual experiences into shared moments of discovery, laughter, and connection.
The workshop demonstrates the potential of human-centered AI to support creative expression, visual communication, and meaningful connection across differences.
Designed for Diverse Communities
Designing for Belonging: Analog + AI Workshops can be adapted for universities, international communities, creative professionals, technology organizations, corporate teams, conferences, and cultural institutions.
The format also offers opportunities to explore human-centered AI, creativity and well-being, cross-cultural communication, visual literacy, and belonging.
Here’s what participants had to say:
It blew my mind how a simple sketch could transform into a kawaii illustration. I’ve always loved the style, but I figured it would take me forever to pull it off so doing with AI was really fun.” —— Vedant
That for the time invested the output was really great and mainly matched the mood I was attempting to describe!” —— Lorraine
It stayed pretty true to what I drew — I could still see my ownership of the idea.” —— Tany
Bring this workshop to your organization
Designing for Belonging: Analog + AI can be delivered as a workshop, keynote, or custom experience tailored to your community. It works for groups of 10 to 100+ participants, in person or online, and can be adapted for universities, companies, conferences, and cultural institutions.
Rather than simply learning about community-building, participants experience it firsthand through creativity, storytelling, and the power of AI to enrich shared human experiences.
