CHI2025 Workshop on Tools for Thought:

Research and Design for Understanding, Protecting, and Augmenting Human Cognition with Generative AI

Saturday, April 26, 2025 — 9AM-5:50PM JST — Yokohama, Japan

About

GenAI radically widens the scope and capability of automation for work, learning, and creativity. While impactful, it also changes workflows, raising questions about its effects on cognition, including critical thinking and learning. Yet GenAI also offers opportunities for designing “tools for thought” that protect and augment cognition. Such systems provoke critical thinking, provide personalized tutoring, or enable novel ways of sensemaking, among other approaches.

How does GenAI change workflows and human cognition? What are opportunities and challenges for designing GenAI systems that protect and augment thinking? Which theories, perspectives, and methods are relevant? This workshop aims to develop a multidisciplinary community interested in exploring these questions to protect against the erosion, and fuel the augmentation, of human cognition using GenAI.

Feel free to join our Discord server, where you can ask questions, or discuss the topics of this workshop.

Key Dates

Workshop Program (Draft)

Time Activity
09:00 - 09:30 Welcome, ice-breaker, and coffee
09:30 - 10:45 Lightning talks + panel discussion: Impact of GenAI on Cognition and Workflows
10:45 - 11:15 Coffee break and informal demos
11:15 - 12:30 Lightning talks + panel discussion: Methods and Theories
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch break (informal networking and discussion)
14:00 - 15:15 Lightning talks + panel discussion: Designing for Cognitive Protection and Augmentation
15:15 - 15:45 Coffee break and informal demos
15:45 - 17:00 Co-ideation session: Mapping Opportunities
17:00 - 17:30 Next steps and closing


Note that the workshop will be in-person only to facilitate in-depth discussion among all participants, and to avoid challenges in ensuring equitable opportunities for participation between in-person and remote attendees. While we acknowledge that this decision would unfortunately exclude those who cannot travel to attend in person, we believe that this trade-off would result in a superior experience for those who do attend, and is better aligned with the primary community-building aim of the workshop. Alongside synchronous in-person engagement, we will use our Discord server, which anyone is free to join, for asynchronous discussions before, during, and after the workshop.

Submissions

Coming soon.

Organizers