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Beyond the Tool vs. Teammate Debate: Exploring the Sidekick Metaphor in Designing Human-AI Dyads
Citation. Bruni, S., Freiman, M., & Riddle, K. (2023). Beyond the tool vs. teammate debate: Exploring the sidekick metaphor in designing human-AI dyads. Human Factors and Simulation, 83, 12–24. https://doi.org/10.54941/ahfe1003558
Summary. This conference paper proposes the sidekick metaphor as an alternative to framing AI only as a tool or teammate in human-AI dyads. A sidekick both accomplishes work and facilitates the human’s work, with design guided by anticipation of user needs, fit to preferences, and avoidance of obstruction. The authors illustrate the metaphor with design cases in intelligence analysis, aircraft maintenance, and missile defense rather than testing comparative outcomes.
Key claims
- The authors argue that the tool-versus-teammate dichotomy misses design-relevant characteristics of human-machine systems in high-intensity vital environments.
- The proposed sidekick framing treats an AI system as both doing work and helping the human do work, rather than locating it at one end of a tool-to-teammate spectrum.
- The paper proposes six preliminary sidekick design principles: automate to remove overhead, go with the user’s flow, design for trust, design for feedback, prioritize simplicity over cleverness, and tailor transparency rather than providing uniform power.
- The paper applies those principles to examples involving intelligence analysis, aircraft maintenance, and missile defense.
Evidence & limitations
- This is a conceptual conference-proceedings paper supported by design examples, not a comparative empirical test of the sidekick metaphor or its effects on human or system performance.
- The authors state that their work has focused on high-intensity vital environments and dyads; it does not formally address informal settings or multiple-human/multiple-sidekick arrangements.
- The Jina artifact was a public landing page; one deterministic open-access PDF retrieval verified a 13-page text-layer paper at the DOI-linked publisher download URL.