This paper presents the AIrt Guide, a flipped-interaction museum learning tool, as a comparative lens on how conversational design shapes interpretive articulation. We report preliminary findings from a study with n = 24 participants, focusing specifically on how these conversational structures shape the linguistic register of artistic interpretation. The Formal Analysis condition was associated with more noun-focused evaluative description and more verb-oriented inquiry framing, while Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) supported longer, more elaborated responses among participants. These preliminary findings suggest localized differences in how dialogue structure shapes interpretive language, rather than broad shifts in artistic engagement, and point toward design implications for conversational agents deployed in open-ended, interpretive contexts. This work contributes to ongoing questions in museum CUI research about how dialogue design influences user expression and interpretive articulation.
A. Cantrell, Orit Shaer· International Conference on...· 0 citations
This paper presents AIrt Guide, a conversational human-AI system designed to scaffold interpretive curiosity and creative meaning-making during art museum visits. Art engagement is inherently interpretive and creative, and AIrt Guide structures dialogue to support sustained observation, evidence-based reasoning, and elaborative perspective shifting during the act of viewing. Grounded in a mini-c framework of everyday creative cognition, the system implements two pedagogical conversational variations: Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) and Formal Analysis. Rather than delivering definitive interpretations, the system supports iterative meaning construction while preserving viewer agency and productive ambiguity. Findings from in-person workshops suggest that this form of conversational scaffolding promotes analytic depth and more explicit articulation of visual evidence. Overall, this work demonstrates the potential of conversational AI as a creativity support tool in cultural settings, augmenting everyday interpretive practice by expanding associative space without resolving meaning.
A. Cantrell, Orit Shaer· Creativity & Cognition· 0 citations
