Orchid: Orchestrating Context Across Creative Workflows with Generative AI

TL;DR

Orchid is a system designed to improve creative workflows with Generative AI by enabling users to specify, reference, and monitor context across multiple interactions, leading to more aligned and innovative outcomes.

Contribution

Orchid introduces a novel interface for managing context in complex, multi-session creative workflows with Generative AI, enhancing user control and creativity.

Findings

Participants produced more novel and feasible outcomes with Orchid.

Users reported greater alignment between intent and AI responses.

Orchid increased perceived control and transparency.

Abstract

Context is critical for meaningful interactions between people and Generative AI (GenAI). Yet mainstream tools offer limited means to orchestrate it, particularly across workflows that span multiple interactions, sessions, and models, as often occurs in creative projects. Re specifying prior details, juggling diverse artifacts, and dealing with context drift overwhelm users, obscure intent, and curtail creativity. To address these challenges, we present Orchid, a system that gives its users affordances to specify, reference, and monitor context throughout evolving workflows. Specifically, Orchid enables users to (1) specify context related to the project, themselves, and different styles, (2) reference these via explicit mentions, inline selection, or implicit grounding, and (3) monitor context assigned to different interactions across the workflow. In a within-subjects study (n=12), participants using Orchid to execute creative tasks (compared to a baseline toolkit of web search, LLM-based chat, and digital notebooks) produced more novel and feasible outcomes, reporting greater alignment between their intent and the AI's responses, higher perceived control, and increased transparency. By prioritizing context orchestration, Orchid offers an actionable step toward next generation GenAI tools that support complex, iterative workflows - enabling creators and AI to stay aligned and augment their creative potential.