Enacting Constructive Conflicts with AI Agents to Enhance Reconsideration among Novice Interaction Designers

Abstract

Generative AI agents are increasingly used in interaction design to facilitate ideation and offer critique, often following their own internal reasoning. These interactions tend to add design ideas and expand the design space. Our work explores an antagonistic role for design agents, prompting designers to engage with stakeholder tension. We built an AI agent inspired by adversarial design theory that enacts constructive conflict. We examine the agent's influence in a between-subjects experiment with 45 design students across three conditions: Self Reflection (unsupported review of the design proposal), Stepwise Guidance (written prompts that walk designers through a constructive-conflict framework), and Interactive Engagement (an AI agent that enacts the constructive-conflict framework interactively by synthesizing stakeholder pushback). The latter two conditions share the framework but differ in whether it is self-enacted or agent-enacted. Results show that, compared with Self Reflection, both the Stepwise Guidance and Interactive Engagement groups reported significantly higher self-reconsideration and made more improvements to their design proposals. Compared with Stepwise Guidance, the antagonistic agent introduced more conflictual perspectives, and participants in the Interactive Engagement condition generated and discarded more ideas. These findings suggest that agent-enacted constructive conflict can turn reconsideration into concrete design actions and deepen engagement with divergent stakeholder perspectives.