Stellar Collaboration explores what happens when humans and AI design together in a collaborative manner. The project centres on Evolutionary Spaceships, a co-creative system where users collaborate with an evolutionary algorithm to design speculative spacecraft. Rather than treating AI as a tool that simply generates results, the system positions it as a creative partner, responding in real time to human intent, preferences, and experimentation.

Spaceship Reproduction

The experience is framed as a playful, science-fiction-inspired interface. Users adjust high-level parameters such as power, crew size, science capacity, or novelty, which directly reshape the fitness function of the underlying evolutionary algorithm. As the system runs, spaceship designs mutate, combine, and evolve across generations, producing visually distinct and often unexpected outcomes. The user continuously evaluates and nudges the system, shaping the creative direction without ever fully controlling it.

A key focus of the project is co-creation as a process. Through user testing and questionnaire-based evaluation, we examined enjoyment, expressiveness, outcome satisfaction, and ownership. Participants generally found the system engaging and intuitive, particularly valuing the ability to save and "claim" their designs. At the same time, the evaluation revealed limits in how collaborative the system felt, highlighting opportunities to better communicate the algorithm's behaviour and give users more direct creative agency.

Stellar Collaboration sits at the intersection of speculative design, human-AI interaction, and computational creativity. Rather than asking whether AI can be creative, the project asks a different question: how do we design systems where creativity emerges between human and machine?