Designing AI to Think with Us, Not for Us

This paper establishes a framework and toolkit for designing Generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) that address foundational challenges of these technologies and reframe the problem‐solution space. The stakes are high for human‐centered solutions: genAI is rapidly disrupting existing markets with technologies that exhibit increasingly complex and emergent abilities, and accelerate scale, cognitive offloading, and distributed cognition. The Problem‐Solution Symbiosis framework and toolkit extends, rather than displaces, human cognition, including tools for envisioning, problem (re)framing and selection, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the alignment of stakeholder needs with the strengths of a genAI system. Applying the toolkit helps us guide the development of useful, desirable genAI by building intuition about system capabilities, developing a systemic understanding of emerging problem spaces, and using a matrix to identify if and when to offload tasks to the system. The framework is informed by systems theory, frame analysis, human‐computer interaction research on current AI design approaches, and analogous approaches from spatial computing design research.