Crafting Hanzi as Narrative Bridges: An AI Co-Creation Workshop for Elderly Migrants

TL;DR

This paper presents an AI-assisted workshop enabling elderly migrants in China to express personal stories through Hanzi calligraphy, combining oral storytelling, symbolic reconstruction, and AI support to enhance narrative agency without digital literacy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel human-AI co-creation method that uses Hanzi and physical materials to help elderly migrants articulate and visualize their personal narratives.

Findings

Participants expressed memories through Hanzi and tactile art.

AI supported symbolic reconstruction without digital literacy.

The approach enhances narrative agency and human-AI collaboration.

Abstract

This paper explores how older adults, particularly aging migrants in urban China, can engage AI-assisted co-creation to express personal narratives that are often fragmented, underrepresented, or difficult to verbalize. Through a pilot workshop combining oral storytelling and the symbolic reconstruction of Hanzi, participants shared memories of migration and recreated new character forms using Xiaozhuan glyphs, suggested by the Large Language Model (LLM), together with physical materials. Supported by human facilitation and a soft AI presence, participants transformed lived experience into visual and tactile expressions without requiring digital literacy. This approach offers new perspectives on human-AI collaboration and aging by repositioning AI not as a content producer but as a supportive mechanism, and by supporting narrative agency within sociotechnical systems.