Cite this article
Kutyreva, N., Davchev, O. (2026) ‘Co-creativity between human, nature, and artificial intelligence’, Architecture Papers of the Faculty of Architecture and Design STU, 31(2), pp. 13-22. https://www.doi.org/10.2478/alfa-2026-0008
SUMMARY
Creativity is an unconditionally unique characteristic of the human brain. This is how it is perceived by the majority of people; this thought is what gives the illusion of human exceptionalism towards Nature. What if Creativity can be expressed by entities having no consciousness or intention? This article explores whether creativity could exist beyond humans. It reinterprets creativity not only as an inherent part of the natural world (which humanity still belongs to), but also as something that does not require consciousness or intent (meaning an author) and can be expressed by natural and digital systems alike.
The study observes creativity from different perspectives: classical philosophical definitions of creativity, different typologies of creativity in psychology and neuroscience, including the theory of functional network connectivity of the human brain in creative processes. It examines the differences and similarities in how creativity manifests in self-aware humans, non-conscious Artificial Intelligence, and the collective intelligence of Nature.
Understanding biological and digital creativity can transform creative search and development of innovations across as architecture, design and art. Through Nature-inclusive design enhanced by AI, humanity can work with Nature directly as a partner and build a bridge between natural world and human cultures and mitigate challenges for mutual beneficial co-existence. This opens a new form of collaboration—Co-creativity.
The theoretical part of the article focuses on understanding what creativity is and offers the definition of Co-creativity that includes non-human types of creative processes: Co-creativity is a distributed creative phenomenon in which human cognition, artificial intelligence, and nature’s adaptive intelligence converge and interact as complementary agents, producing novel outcomes that exceed the creative capacity of any single system acting alone.
The practical experiment showcases a framework of Co-creativity between Human, Nature, and Generative Artificial Intelligence. Utilising the complementary properties of the Triad, the paper explores democratisation of AI tools and a personalised dataset to train site-specific Generative AI.
The developed AI-assisted Biodesign workflow is based on suburban metro areas around Portland, Oregon, which has one of the largest urban forests in US. This unique landscape allowed unique proximity to wildlife areas in between suburbia neighbourhoods. The workflow applies the theory of Co-creativity Triad through contemporary generative tools to develop a solution, merging the specific design context and landscape meanwhile focusing on local ecosystem vision and needs.
Generative AI models are trained on very broad amounts of data, meanwhile Nature is always location specific. The novelty of the approach includes the specific treatment of the personalised data set that is a core of the workflow. It allows Generative AI to be more sensitive to architectural patterns in Nature that eventually translated into output.
The core of the workflow is based on a lightweight fine-tuning technique LoRA (Low-rank adaptation), for additional training of a chosen large AI model new concepts, styles, or subjects without retraining the entire model, a personalised data set for LoRA training that represents Pacific Northwest ecosystems that was created by the authors of the article.
After multiple experiments with different settings, it is noticeable that using an additionally trained LoRA on top of the base model helps to achieve more striking visual results tuned to local-specific design intent. The outputs are evaluated by technical generation quality and by how the Co-creativity Triad framework is represented in the proposed solutions.
Forcing AI to see architectural solutions helps to establish hidden connections that eventually bring unexpected proportions and compositions into hybrid bioinspired structures that look purposefully designed. The personalised data set blends a specific aesthetic choice with the acuteness of AI intelligence that follows the prompt and generates solutions that integrate both human-centric and nature-inclusive perspectives on form-finding and problem-solving design strategies.
Even if the human role as facilitator is still prominent, inviting Nature as an ever-present collaborator through the GenAI vision enhances co-created results and helps designers in expressing their ideas through nature inclusive solutions.
Co-creativity offers holistic distributed creative approach to Biodesign with consideration of other species and creates new Earth-centred sustainable solutions that continuously adapt throughout the lifetime of the product to make human material culture neutral or beneficial for Nature ecosystems and Humanity.
Through this lens Earth-centred design is an end goal of human tech. Though it separated humanity from nature, it can eventually build the bridge back and reintegrate humanity with its biological self. Co-creativity emerges when human symbolic reasoning, AI pattern recognition and nature’s adaptive intelligence converge into a planetary computation.