Designing Around the Human Creative Core: A Construct for Preserving Creative Agency in Human-AI Systems

Generative AI can increasingly perform the parts of professional work where a person's judgment and sense of identity are most engaged. The common design instinct is to automate wherever AI can plausibly take over, treating capability as the test. This efficiency-first instinct can erode the skill, judgment, ownership, and professional identity. Human-Centered AI frameworks show how to structure collaboration and keep people in control, but not which elements of a given workflow sustain a person's creative agency. This paper introduces the Human Creative Core: the subset of workflow elements where a person's cognitive contribution and psychological investment converge, identified through four dimensions, strategic intention, signature judgment, identity and ownership, and developmental function. The construct yields a design principle, complement the core and automate the periphery, and a method for locating the core in a given workflow. The method was taught and applied in a graduate instructional design course, and is demonstrated here across five professional cases. The contribution is a design construct and a repeatable method for building AI that preserves, and can strengthen, a person's creative agency rather than dissolving it.