In group ideation, whether participants should ideate collaboratively or individually remains controversial. Collaborative ideation enables synergy, whereby creativity is stimulated through inspiration from others’ ideas; yet it also introduces evaluation apprehension, which can inhibit creativity due to fear of judgment. In contrast, solitary ideation mitigates evaluation apprehension but cannot foster synergy. Existing hybrid approaches have attempted to alternate between the two modes to balance their strengths, but it remains underexplored how to simultaneously integrate the advantages of both settings. Therefore, we developed GraftMind, a system that enables users to ideate in private workspaces while an AI mediator proactively leverages collective ideas to provide real-time ideation assistance. The results of a user study demonstrate that GraftMind enhances group ideation performance; it not only enables synergy but also alleviates evaluation apprehension. Our findings underscore the potential of this novel group ideation setting.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems