Collaborative Ideation Partner: Design Ideation in Human-AI Co-creativity

AI-based co-creative design systems enable users to collaborate with an AI agent on open-ended creative tasks during the design process. This paper describes a co-creative system that supports design creativity by providing inspiring design solutions in the initial idea generation process, based on the visual and conceptual similarity to sketches drawn by a designer. The interactive experience allows the user to seek inspiration collaborating with the AI agent as needed. In this paper, we study how the visual and conceptual similarity of the inspiring design from the AI partner influences design ideation by examining the effect on design ideation during a design task. Our findings show that the AI-based stimuli produce ideation outcomes with more variety and novelty when compared to random stimuli.