The generation of truly novel and diverse ideas is important for contemporary engineering design, yet it remains a significant cognitive challenge for novice designers. Current 'single-spurt' AI systems exacerbate this challenge by producing a high volume of semantically clustered ideas. We propose MIDAS (Meta-cognitive Ideation through Distributed Agentic AI System), a novel framework that replaces the single-AI paradigm with a distributed 'team' of specialized AI agents designed to emulate the human meta-cognitive ideation workflow. This agentic system progressively refines ideas and assesses each one for both global novelty (against existing solutions) and local novelty (against previously generated ideas). MIDAS, therefore, demonstrates a viable and progressive paradigm for true human-AI co-creation, elevating the human designer from a passive filterer to a participatory, active, collaborative partner.

翻译：生成真正新颖且多样化的想法对于当代工程设计至关重要，但这对于新手设计师而言仍是一项重大的认知挑战。当前"单次迸发"式AI系统通过产生大量语义聚类的想法，反而加剧了这一挑战。我们提出MIDAS（基于分布式智能体AI系统的元认知构思框架），这是一种新颖的框架，它用专门化AI智能体组成的分布式"团队"取代了单一AI范式，旨在模拟人类元认知构思的工作流程。该智能体系统逐步优化想法，并从全局新颖性（相对于现有解决方案）和局部新颖性（相对于先前生成的想法）两个维度对每个想法进行评估。因此，MIDAS展示了一种可行且渐进式的真正人机协同创作范式，将人类设计师从被动的筛选者提升为参与式、主动的协作伙伴。