A Novel Idea Generation Tool using a Structured Conversational AI (CAI) System (2409.05747v1)

Abstract: This paper presents a novel conversational AI-enabled active ideation interface as a creative idea-generation tool to assist novice designers in mitigating the initial latency and ideation bottlenecks that are commonly observed. It is a dynamic, interactive, and contextually responsive approach, actively involving a LLM from the domain of NLP in AI to produce multiple statements of potential ideas for different design problems. Integrating such AI models with ideation creates what we refer to as an Active Ideation scenario, which helps foster continuous dialogue-based interaction, context-sensitive conversation, and prolific idea generation. A pilot study was conducted with thirty novice designers to generate ideas for given problems using traditional methods and the new CAI-based interface. The key parameters of fluency, novelty, and variety were used to compare the outcomes qualitatively by a panel of experts. The findings demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed tool for generating prolific, diverse and novel ideas. The interface was enhanced by incorporating a prompt-engineered structured dialogue style for each ideation stage to make it uniform and more convenient for the designers. The resulting responses of such a structured CAI interface were found to be more succinct and aligned towards the subsequent design stage, namely conceptualization. The paper thus established the rich potential of using Generative AI (Gen-AI) for the early ill-structured phase of the creative product design process.

• The paper presents a novel CAI system that enhances creative idea generation by integrating a large language model.
• It employs a structured dialogue approach to overcome latency and ideation bottlenecks during the design process.
• A pilot study with thirty novice designers demonstrated significant improvements in fluency, novelty, and variety over traditional methods.

The paper "A Novel Idea Generation Tool using a Structured Conversational AI (CAI) System" presents an innovative approach to enhancing creative idea generation, particularly for novice designers. The authors introduce a Conversational AI-enabled active ideation tool that leverages the capabilities of a LLM from the natural language processing domain. This tool addresses common issues such as initial latency and ideation bottlenecks that designers face during the creative process.

The proposed system is dynamic, interactive, and contextually responsive, emphasizing continuous dialogue-based interaction to foster prolific idea generation. It integrates AI models within the ideation process to create an "Active Ideation" scenario. This approach allows for generating multiple statements of potential ideas tailored to different design problems.

A pilot paper was conducted involving thirty novice designers who used both traditional methods and the new CAI-based interface for ideation. The paper evaluated the outcomes based on fluency, novelty, and variety by a panel of experts. The findings showed that the CAI tool was effective in generating diverse and novel ideas.

One of the notable features of the CAI interface is its structured dialogue style, which enhances the uniformity and convenience of the ideation process. This prompt-engineered structure results in more succinct responses, well-aligned with the subsequent stage of design, namely conceptualization.

Overall, the paper establishes the potential of integrating Generative AI (Gen-AI) into the early, ill-structured phases of product design, offering a comprehensive solution to improve the creativity and efficiency of novice designers during the ideation stage.