Modeling Sequential Design Actions as Designer Externalization on an Infinite Canvas

TL;DR

This study explores how AI agents influence professional designers' externalization processes on infinite canvases, revealing shifts in cognitive effort, workflow cycles, and AI roles during design tasks.

Contribution

It provides the first empirical analysis of AI's impact on designers' externalization behaviors in infinite canvas environments, proposing a phase-adaptive AI support model.

Findings

AI shifts cognitive effort from spatial to content management

Designers' demands on AI increase over workflow phases

AI role transitions from divergent to convergent support

Abstract

Infinite canvas platforms are becoming central to contemporary design practice, enabling designers to externalize cognition through the spatial arrangement of multimodal artifacts. As AI agents increasingly generate and organize content within these environments, their impact on designers' externalization processes remains underexplored. We report a field study with eight professional designers comparing workflows with and without an AI organizing agent. Through a sequence analysis of 5,838 design actions, we identify three key shifts: (1) AI integration reallocates cognitive effort from spatial management to content curation and relational structuring, without increasing active time; (2) a characteristic generate-and-curate cycle emerges in which designers' demands on the agent intensify while the agent's functional role adapts; and (3) AI's role evolves from a divergent catalyst in early stages to a convergent curator in later phases. These findings offer a behavioral model for designing phase-adaptive AI tools that support human-AI co-evolution on infinite canvases.