I Buy What I Design: Meaning Co-creation and Situational Self Expression

Drawing on 7,602 human-AI co-created physical designs from the “ZaoHaoWu” platform, this study promptly identifies and focuses on the IB-ID (I buy what I design) user group—individuals who embody dual identities as both designers and consumers—and examines how they embed identity narratives into products, thereby shifting from symbolic possession to meaning co-creation.We developed a 2 (mobile vs. fixed context) × 2 (functional vs. decorative attributes) conceptual framework and employed visual language model (Qwen2.5-VLM) and large language models (Qwen3-turbo) to extract textual information from images, enabling thematic discovery and construction of fine-grained emotional semantic networks.Three key findings emerged:(1) User creative preferences can be categorized into four structural themes: Mythic, Whimsy, Sinofuturism, and Pastiche. Among them, Sinofuturism—which fuses local cultural symbols with futuristic imagination—achieved the highest social engagement, highlighting how strong cultural signifiers effectively stimulate high user participation.(2) Emotional expression is highly context-dependent: mobile contexts carry significantly more joy than fixed contexts, and decorative attributes further amplify positive emotions.(3) Functional products exhibit notably more cohesive emotional semantics, whereas decorative products display more dispersed emotional expressions. Collectively, these findings support the core proposition of our proposed Situational Self-Expression (SSE) theory—that self-expression is jointly shaped by usage context and product attributes.These insights not only reconstruct McCracken’s Meaning Transfer Model (MTM) into an updated Meaning Co-Creation Model (MCcM), but also advance human-AI collaborative creation beyond virtual showcases into real-world consumption loops. They offer brands a three-dimensional design guideline centered on context–cultural symbols–emotion.