Overview of the three decision tasks
The typology contains three decision-making tasks: choose, activate, and create.
Each task evaluates information differently:
| Task | Main question | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Choose | Which option is best? | A selected option or top-k subset |
| Activate | Which options meet the criteria? | All options that pass a threshold |
| Create | What new information or options can be generated? | New options, modified options, or new information |
All three tasks operate on options. Options are the entities being considered in a decision. They might be cars, homes, embryos, satellite designs, patients, visual encodings, transactions, or possible actions.
Options can have features, such as price, risk, morphology, cost, time, or score. They may also be evaluated using criteria, such as “under budget,” “clinically viable,” “high priority,” or “best predicted outcome.”
The typology distinguishes tasks not by the domain or data type, but by the structure of the evaluation. The original paper defines choose, activate, and create as three fundamental ways that information is processed during decision-making.