TriKoNet: The Trivalence Model of Potential Co-Creativity in Socio-Technical Networks

Synthesis: Ruhland introduces TriKoNet, an Actor-Network Theory-based model that conceptualizes Creativity not as an individual attribute but as an emergent effect of socio-technical networks, modeling it as a processual triadic interplay of stabilization, destabilization, and re-stabilization among human and non-human actors. In an exploratory two-phase study, pedagogical avatars were designed within a creative network, and the analysis reconstructs how the designs emerged through problematization, interessement, enrollment, and mobilisation. TriKoNet allows diagnosing how technical artifacts — including generative AI systems and AI agents, conceptualized as equal, constitutive network participants — stabilize, destabilize, or re-stabilize creative learning processes, yielding four preliminary design principles and a modular design framework.

Co-Creativity as Network Effect

The paper challenges the view of creativity as an individual cognitive trait. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, it conceptualizes creativity as an emergent effect of socio-technical networks — a processual triadic interplay of stabilization, destabilization, and re-stabilization across human and non-human actors. The study is grounded in an exploratory two-phase investigation in which pedagogical avatars were designed within a creative network, reconstructing how avatar designs emerged through problematization, interessement, enrollment, and mobilisation. The findings show the avatar triad concept was not the result of individual creative acts but was constituted through iterative translation processes among students, researchers, and technical artifacts such as collaborative design tools and generative AI systems.

The Convenience Trap and Agency

The paper engages with the "Convenience Trap," which shifts human Learner Agency and creativity toward machine-induced convenience, leading to loss of competence and homogenisation. There is a lack of pedagogical and learning-theoretical research explaining how co-creative learning with AI agents can function without a loss of human agency. TriKoNet addresses this by showing that AI-supported avatars are not problematic per se as black boxes — what matters is the co-constitution of their action structure by the learners. This connects to Sociocultural Learning and Collaborative Learning perspectives on learning as mediated by tools and social interaction.

Design Implications

TriKoNet allows diagnosing the extent to which technical artifacts stabilize, destabilize, or re-stabilize creative learning processes under three conditions: shared cultural reference resources, opportunities for meta-communication, and structurally open scripts. From this the article derives four preliminary design principles and a modular design framework connecting stable structural principles (role logic, technical presence, claim to inclusion) with variable appropriation space — a starting point for translating TriKoNet into a design instrument to be tested later. Implications for practice include focusing on technological agency, promoting co-creative learning networks, orchestrating interplay between students and AI agents, and preferring modular tools over ready-made avatars.

Connected Concepts

• Creativity
• Pedagogical Agent
• Sociocultural Learning
• Generative AI
• Learner Agency
• Collaborative Learning
• Design-Based Research
• Agentic AI

Connected Articles

• An Emancipatory Vision for Designing (Generative) AI for Learner Flourishing — An Emancipatory Vision for Generative AI Design
• Reclaiming Epistemic Agency: A Critical Framework for Human-Generative AI Co-Agency in Education — Reclaiming Epistemic Agency

Citation

Ruhland, C. (2026). TriKoNet: The Trivalence Model of Potential Co-Creativity in Socio-Technical Networks. EdArXiv preprint.