Abstract
As intelligent cockpits transition toward experience-centered scenario design, designers must organize increasingly complex relationships among users, behaviors, and system responses. While Generative AI (GenAI) accelerates early-stage exploration, it often struggles to interpret designers’ intentions, resulting in semantic drift and inconsistencies. This study proposes NarratAIve, a structured narrative–driven framework for human–AI co-creation in intelligent cockpit design. The framework encodes users, actions, contexts, and feedback into computable narrative units that serve as clear semantic inputs for cross-modal AI generation. Through two workshops with 24 participants (including graduate students and industry experts), six cockpit concepts were produced, demonstrating how narrative acts as a controllable mechanism for guiding AI and enabling iterative alignment between narrative text and AI-generated spatial, interaction, and formal expressions. The findings show that structured narrative significantly improves design clarity, enhances human–AI negotiation, and expands the breadth and precision of scenario-based concept development.
Keywords
Narrative design; Human–AI co-creation; Intelligent cockpit;Human–AI alignment
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.594
Citation
Zhao, D., Liu, Y., Jiang, Y., and Xue, Z. (2026) NarratAIve: Using Narrative for Human–AI Co-Creation in Intelligent Cockpits, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.594
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
NarratAIve: Using Narrative for Human–AI Co-Creation in Intelligent Cockpits
As intelligent cockpits transition toward experience-centered scenario design, designers must organize increasingly complex relationships among users, behaviors, and system responses. While Generative AI (GenAI) accelerates early-stage exploration, it often struggles to interpret designers’ intentions, resulting in semantic drift and inconsistencies. This study proposes NarratAIve, a structured narrative–driven framework for human–AI co-creation in intelligent cockpit design. The framework encodes users, actions, contexts, and feedback into computable narrative units that serve as clear semantic inputs for cross-modal AI generation. Through two workshops with 24 participants (including graduate students and industry experts), six cockpit concepts were produced, demonstrating how narrative acts as a controllable mechanism for guiding AI and enabling iterative alignment between narrative text and AI-generated spatial, interaction, and formal expressions. The findings show that structured narrative significantly improves design clarity, enhances human–AI negotiation, and expands the breadth and precision of scenario-based concept development.