re:MAIC is a research collaboration in human–computer interaction across Södertörn University, Stockholm University and the University of Gothenburg. It studies how people create together with generative AI, where programming and design increasingly merge.
re:MAIC asks what computers, people and interaction become when computers interpret, generate and act.
The group questions the dominant framing of human–AI collaboration and alignment, and examines how meaning, agency and intention are negotiated and displaced in practice.
Generative and agentic AI change how both programmers and designers work. Programmers increasingly describe intentions, sketch and evaluate, while designers can build working systems directly from their ideas. As agents take over more of the making, the two practices come to share tools, materials and forms of judgement.
The group studies how people instruct, interpret and collaborate with systems that are no longer fixed applications.
Tools are not presented as solutions. Ethics is studied in action, in the situated judgements people make while programming and designing with generative systems.
What happens to meaning, agency and intention when machines take part in making?
Meaning takes shape in interaction. As people and systems interpret and respond to each other, what a request, a sketch or a piece of code means is worked out along the way.
Agency and control are redistributed between people, tools and organisations. The work asks who acts, who is in control, and who is the author of and answerable for the result.
Intentions drift between a person, a system and the artefact produced. The group studies how they are formed, communicated and sometimes lost.
Co-creation is treated as a practice to be designed and questioned. Co-coding, co-creation in programming, is the case most studied so far, alongside design ideation and sketching with generative models.
The themes are entangled, and most studies touch all four.
Empirical studies of practice are combined with prototypes made to raise questions.
Designing and building are ways of producing knowledge. Prototypes and design interventions with generative systems make questions of meaning, agency and intention concrete enough to study in use.
Provotypes and speculative systems, some of which may never reach the market, make possible relations between people and machines tangible. Some are counterfunctional on purpose, to show what failure reveals about intention and interpretation.
The work draws on posthumanism and post-phenomenology, with concepts such as agency, entanglement, situated action and scene-setting. Hermeneutics and ethnomethodology inform the analysis of interpretation and instruction.
Projects within and around re:MAIC.
re:MAIC is run by three researchers in human–computer interaction. Researchers and PhD students take part as members, and more will join as the group grows.
Papers, articles and public writing by the members, grouped by year.
The full list is being compiled from the members' publication lists.
News from the group: publications, seminars, workshops and open positions.
re:MAIC organises and takes part in workshops, seminars and conference sessions on co-creation with AI.
re:MAIC is open to students, researchers and partners who want to work on co-creation with AI from an interaction perspective.
Master's students with an interest in the themes are welcome to propose thesis projects, through any of the three universities. Projects can be empirical, design-oriented or conceptual. The principal investigators are the first point of contact.
Open positions will be announced here. Researchers who want to visit, collaborate or co-author are invited to get in touch.
The group welcomes collaboration with organisations that wish to study, question or try out new forms of co-creation, including public sector, civil society and industry.