A novel idea generation tool using a structured conversational AI (CAI) system

Abstract This article presents a novel conversational artificial intelligence (CAI)-enabled active ideation system as a creative idea generation tool to assist novice product 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 dialog-based interaction, context-sensitive conversation, and prolific idea generation. An empirical study was conducted with 30 novice product designers to generate multiple ideas for given problems using traditional methods and the new CAI-based interface. The ideas generated by both methods were qualitatively evaluated by a panel of experts. The findings demonstrated the relative superiority of the proposed tool for generating prolific, meaningful, novel, and diverse ideas. The interface was enhanced by incorporating a prompt-engineered structured dialog style for each ideation stage to make it uniform and more convenient for the product designers. A pilot study was conducted and the resulting responses of such a structured CAI interface were found to be more succinct and aligned toward the subsequent design stage. The article thus established the rich potential of using generative AI (Gen-AI) for the early ill-structured phase of the creative product design process.