Scaffolding Recursive Divergence and Convergence in Story Ideation
This addresses the problem of limited creative ideation support in AI tools for users like writers or designers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing creativity support tools.
The paper tackled the lack of AI support for sophisticated orchestration of divergence and convergence in creative ideation by introducing Reverger, an AI-powered creativity support tool that scaffolds recursive iteration between exploring diverse story directions and synthesizing them into concrete variations. A study showed that Reverger allowed users to explore more unexpected and diverse high-level directions than a baseline and provided greater control and discovery of effort-worthy outcomes.
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.