Surprise2Refine: Axis-Centered Exploration-To-Refinement for Agent-Assisted Creative Scaffolding

Designers require different design spaces across creative stages: broad during exploration, and targeted during refinement. Yet existing agent-driven tools assume a fixed or continuously expanding space, leaving designers to manage and navigate it themselves. Informed by a formative study with five designers, we propose an axis-centered workflow that adaptively broadens and narrows the design space to support structured exploration and refinement. We implemented this workflow in Surprise2Refine,

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ethics.ai (12 August 2026), “Surprise2Refine: Axis-Centered Exploration-To-Refinement for Agent-Assisted Creative Scaffolding,” evidence record 19457, https://ethics.ai/record/19457 (originally published by arXiv cs.HC).

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