An illustration of the top of the statue of The Thinker by Rodin. There is a nest in his head, with three chicks sticking out, and their parent bird flying above.

Tools for Thought

Better thinking through AI

Much AI research focuses on solving specific tasks for people – generating content or automating processes. While such systems may be powerful, there are risks that this approach impact the way people think and therefore learn, build skills, and deploy expertise.

The Tools for Thought (T4T) team aims to help researchers and developers imagine how AI might help people to think better, so that:

as well as getting the job done, it helps us better understand and figure out the job.
as well as creating content, it helps us think more critically and with more insight throughout an entire workflow.
as well as seeking speed and efficiency, it helps us create outcomes that are more effective and of higher quality because they are the product of better answers from better questions.
as well as augmenting individual cognition and tasks, it augments collective cognition and workflows.
as well as automating known processes, it helps organisations predict and explore the unknown.

Outputs of T4T include principles and guidelines for supporting cognition in any user experience, and systems and new technologies that stand as practical instantiations of what it means to support better thinking using AI. See our recent blog post on The Future of AI in Knowledge Work: Tools for Thought at CHI 2025.

This is a venn diagram that shows 10 types of thinking that the Tools for Thought team are interested in.

Workstreams

Thinking By Doing: How should we re-invent tools by using AI to support human cognition in the moment?

Critical Thinking with AI: How might we design interfaces to promote critical thinking about task and AI output when working with generative AI

Explanations from AI: How might we enable better AI explanations for LLMs by providing user control over their characteristics and formation?

“It’s like a rubber duck that talks back”: Understanding Generative AI-Assisted Data Analysis Workflows through a Participatory Prompting Study

Diversity of Thought with AI: Can AI agents support conversations with users that are rich, meaningful and well rounded, and that give humans agency over the discussion?

YES AND: A Generative AI Multi-Agent Framework for Enhancing Diversity of Thought in Individual Ideation for Problem-Solving Through Confidence-Based Agent Turn-Taking

Learning with AI: What impact do generative AI tools have on people’s understanding and memory of what they are doing, and how can they help build core cognitive capabilities?

Effects of LLM use and note-taking on reading comprehension and memory: A randomised experiment in secondary schools (opens in new tab)

Working Together With Purpose: How should we re-invent workflows by using AI to support collaborative metacognition?

Metacognition & AI: How do generative AI systems impose metacognitive demands on users, and how might they instead incorporate metacognitive support strategies?

Working Together with Purpose: How are complex collaborative intents formed? How are they formed and how do they evolve over time?

Coming soon

Intentional Meetings with AI: How might we leverage generative AI to encourage self reflection and self awareness around collaboration, in order to make meetings more intentional?

Generative UI for AI (with the ENCODE project): How might we create AI generated interfaces that support task decomposition in the context of data analysis, as well as provide affordances that allow for verification?

People

The Tools for Thought team is interdisciplinary, mixing experts in social science, computer science, engineering, and design. The team is co-lead by Richard Banks and Sean Rintel.