Scaffolding Recursive Divergence and Convergence in Story Ideation

TL;DR

Reverger is an AI-powered creativity support tool that facilitates iterative story ideation by scaffolding recursive divergence and convergence, enabling users to explore diverse directions and synthesize them into coherent story variations.

Contribution

This paper introduces Reverger, a novel AI tool that orchestrates recursive divergence and convergence in story ideation, addressing limitations of existing creativity support systems.

Findings

Reverger enables exploration of more unexpected story directions.

Users felt greater control and discovered more valuable outcomes.

Reverger outperformed baseline tools in diversifying high-level story ideas.

Abstract

Human creative ideation involves both exploration of diverse ideas (divergence) and selective synthesis of explored ideas into coherent combinations (convergence). While processes of divergence and convergence are often interleaved and nested, existing AI-powered creativity support tools (CSTs) lack support for sophisticated orchestration of divergence and convergence. We present Reverger, an AI-powered CST that helps users ideate variations of conceptual directions for modifying a story by scaffolding flexible iteration between divergence and convergence. For divergence, our tool enables recursive exploration of alternative high-level directions for modifying a specific part of the original story. For convergence, it allows users to collect explored high-level directions and synthesize them into concrete variations. Users can then iterate between divergence and convergence until they find a satisfactory outcome. A within-subject study revealed that Reverger permitted participants to explore more unexpected and diverse high-level directions than a comparable baseline. Reverger users also felt that they had more fine-grained control and discovered more effort-worthy outcomes.