Zelun Tony Zhang

Building on the first Tools for Thought (TfT) workshop at CHI 2025, we invite researchers, designers, and practitioners to further operationalise approaches for the design, usage, and evaluation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) as a TfT. The first goal of the workshop is to put into focus which outcomes a TfT should help people achieve to effectively augment their cognition while avoiding its erosion. Secondly, we will explore how to achieve these outcomes through design and usage strategies. Third, the workshop will also address what a TfT needs for its successful adoption and integration into people’s flow, so that they can benefit from the tools’ potential in their own terms. By focussing on these three research goals, the workshop aims to further develop and advance the multidisciplinary TfT community interested in exploring research frameworks, theories, methods, and approaches to conceptualising, designing, and researching GenAI as a TfT.

AI is anticipated to enhance human decision-making in high-stakes domains like aviation, but adoption is often hindered by challenges such as inappropriate reliance and poor alignment with users' decision-making. Recent research suggests that a core underlying issue is the recommendation-centric design of many AI systems, i.e., they give end-to-end recommendations and ignore the rest of the decision-making process. Alternative support paradigms are rare, and it remains unclear how the few that do exist compare to recommendation-centric support. In this work, we aimed to empirically compare recommendation-centric support to an alternative paradigm, continuous support, in the context of diversions in aviation. We conducted a mixed-methods study with 32 professional pilots in a realistic setting. To ensure the quality of our study scenarios, we conducted a focus group with four additional pilots prior to the study. We found that continuous support can support pilots' decision-making in a forward direction, allowing them to think more beyond the limits of the system and make faster decisions when combined with recommendations, though the forward support can be disrupted. Participants' statements further suggest a shift in design goal away from providing recommendations, to supporting quick information gathering. Our results show ways to design more helpful and effective AI decision support that goes beyond end-to-end recommendations.

Explaining the mechanisms behind model predictions is a common strategy in AI-assisted decision-making to help users rely appropriately on AI. However, recent research shows that the effectiveness of explanations depends on numerous factors, leading to mixed results, with many studies finding no effect or even an increase in overreliance, while explanations do improve appropriate reliance in other studies. We consider the factor of decision difficulty to better understand when feature-based explanations can mitigate overreliance. To this end, we conducted an online experiment (N = 200) with carefully selected task instances that cover a wide range of difficulties. We found that explanations reduce overreliance for easy decisions, but that this effect vanishes with increasing decision difficulty. For the most difficult decisions, explanations might even increase overreliance. Our results imply that explanations of the model’s inner workings are only helpful for a limited set of decision tasks where users easily know the answer themselves.

Intelligent decision support tools (DSTs) hold the promise to improve the quality of human decision-making in challenging situations like diversions in aviation. To achieve these improvements, a common goal in DST design is to calibrate decision makers’ trust in the system. However, this perspective is mostly informed by controlled studies and might not fully reflect the real-world complexity of diversions. In order to understand how DSTs can be beneficial in the view of those who have the best understanding of the complexity of diversions, we interviewed professional pilots. To facilitate discussions, we built two low-fidelity prototypes, each representing a different role a DST could assume: (a) actively suggesting and ranking airports based on pilot-specified criteria, and (b) unobtrusively hinting at data points the pilot should be aware of. We find that while pilots would not blindly trust a DST, they at the same time reject deliberate trust calibration in the moment of the decision. We revisit appropriation as a lens to understand this seeming contradiction as well as a range of means to enable appropriation. Aside from the commonly considered need for transparency, these include directability and continuous support throughout the entire decision process. Based on our design exploration, we encourage to expand the view on DST design beyond trust calibration at the point of the actual decision.