FlexMind: Supporting Deeper Creative Thinking with LLMs

Abstract

Expert ideation requires more than generating ideas. People must articulate trade-offs, develop mitigations, and compare parallel directions, yet this reasoning process is cognitively demanding. Existing ideation tools fall short by either focusing only on expanding or organizing the idea space, or by offering evaluations without supporting mitigation generation and continued reasoning over newly introduced trade-offs. We present FlexMind, an AI-augmented system that proactively scaffolds multi-threaded trade-off-mitigation chains within a structured workspace. FlexMind helps users surface concrete trade-offs, generate actionable mitigations, and navigate and expand multiple idea branches. In a controlled study (n=20), FlexMind supported deeper exploration without sacrificing breadth and produced higher-quality ideas, as judged by domain experts, compared to a baseline. A case study with six experts (n=6) further reveals how FlexMind supports idea analysis while helping uncover new solutions. These results inform implications for enhancing human-AI co-creation.