Creativity support tool (CST) research in HCI has focused on supporting art-making, not art-sharing – despite the fact that distribution activities characterize the bulk of creative labor for online artists today. How might we better understand the way technology systems – including new generative AI systems – support or disrupt online creative communities, at a network level? Through interviews with 25 artists, data scientists, and data artists, we develop the Creativity Supportive Ecosystem: a framework for understanding the function of the online art world, and the roles that system designers can take to better empower artists against creative community threats, like non-consensual reuse and genAI-driven displacement.

To study this, we developed DreamSheets, a design probe Text-To-Image “sandbox” in a spreadsheet. We observed novice and expert artists use the tool as a computational substrate – developing their own TTI interfaces as "sheet-systems" that exemplified a variety of sensemaking strategies and creative exploration styles.