Embodied Creative Agents: A Preliminary Social-Cognitive Framework

The goal of this paper is to open discussion about industrial creativity as a potential application field for Embodied Conversational Agents. We introduce the domain of creativity and especially focus on a collective creativity tool, the brainstorming: we present the related research in Psychology which has identified several key cognitive and social mechanisms that influence brainstorming process and outcome. However, some dimensions remain unexplored, such as the influence of the partners' personality or the facilitator's personality on idea generation. We propose to explore these issues, among others, using Embodied Conversational Agents. The idea seems original given that Embodied Agents were never included into brainstorming computer tools. We draw some hypotheses and a research program, and conclude on the potential benefits for the knowledge on creativity process on the one hand, and for the field of Embodied Conversational Agents on the other hand.

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