Alayt Issak

Alayt A. Issak is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Design and Media at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media, and Design (CAMD). Her research sits at the intersection of philosophy, creativity, and human-AI interaction, where she studies the human values and interaction mechanisms embedded in co-creativity with a focus on centering the creative process in the design of co-creative systems.

Distinguished by a practice that bridges academic inquiry with artistic work, Issak brings an interdisciplinary lens to the emergent nature of human-AI collaboration. Her dissertation, Designing Ethical Human-AI Systems for the Co-Creative Practice, seeks to understand the possibility of a “co-creative practice” — an innate act of interaction characterized much like using the voice to sing. Her work spans theoretical conceptualization, empirical studies, and speculative and critical design.

Issak has published consecutively at the International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC) since 2022, and her work has appeared at CHI, C&C, and AIES, among other venues. Her C&C 2026 paper, “Recognizing Creativity as a Right,” argues for recognizing creativity as a human and cultural right and presents the CORE design framework to translate rights into actionable implications for co-creative system designers, policymakers, and design researchers.

Her research has been recognized through fellowships, doctoral consortia, and invited talks at institutions including the University of Warsaw, the University of Edinburgh, Tufts University, and Penn State. She is a member of GhostLab at Northeastern, an external member of the Autotelic Interaction Research Group at Aalto University, and an external researcher at the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s Creativity, AI, and the Human cluster.

Issak holds a BA in Mathematics and Studio Art, summa cum laude, from The College of Wooster, and has held research positions at IBM Research, the David Harold Blackwell Summer Research Institute, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.