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

TL;DR

This paper introduces a structured conversational AI tool that enhances idea generation for novice designers by providing a dynamic, interactive, and context-aware dialogue system that produces diverse and novel ideas efficiently.

Contribution

It presents a novel structured CAI system integrated with LLMs for active ideation, improving idea diversity, fluency, and alignment in early design phases.

Findings

The CAI tool generates more diverse ideas than traditional methods.

Structured dialogue improves response relevance and succinctness.

The system effectively supports early-stage creative design processes.

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 large language model (LLM) from the domain of natural language processing (NLP) in artificial intelligence (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.