Texterial: A Text-as-Material Interaction Paradigm for LLM-Mediated Writing

TL;DR

This work expands the design space of writing tools by treating text as a living, malleable medium and presents the design and evaluation of two technical probes: Text as Clay, where users refine text through gestural sculpting, and Text as Plants, where ideas grow serendipitously over time.

Abstract

What if text could be sculpted and refined like clay -- or cultivated and pruned like a plant? Texterial reimagines text as a material that users can grow, sculpt, and transform. Current generative-AI models enable rich text operations, yet rigid, linear interfaces often mask such capabilities. We explore how the text-as-material metaphor can reveal AI-enabled operations, reshape the writing process, and foster compelling user experiences. A formative study shows that users readily reason with text-as-material, informing a conceptual framework that explains how material metaphors shift mental models and bridge gulfs of envisioning, execution, and evaluation in LLM-mediated writing. We present the design and evaluation of two technical probes: Text as Clay, where users refine text through gestural sculpting, and Text as Plants, where ideas grow serendipitously over time. This work expands the design space of writing tools by treating text as a living, malleable medium.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Elicitation materials from our formative study. The inspirational cards include entry-level crafts (gardening, pottery, photography) and advanced ones (embroidery, beekeeping), as well as inanimate (clay, threads), living (plants, bees), and hybrid materials (photographed scenes).
• Figure 2: Norman's stages-of-action norman2013design model expanded, with areas (in red) where interactions with LLMs are particularly difficult as identified by Subramonyam et al. subramonyam2024bridging.
• Figure 3: Texterial conceptual framework: LLMs allow users to operate on the semantics, structure and style components of text at different levels of abstraction.
• Figure 4: Texterial conceptual framework: Text operations users/models perform. composing combines textual components together; abstracting moves to a meta-layer of any of the components; ideating takes a single seed and generates new concepts; condensing makes a component's content shorter; and finally transforming preserves the main qualities of a component, but expresses the content in a different way. Many of these operations have inverse functions: for example, instead of composing, users might isolate a single component into multiple distinct components.
• Figure 5: Examples of some of the key conceptual differences between AI-mediated text manipulation when using a prompt-based (green) vs. material-based (purple) interaction paradigm, and the perceived affordances norman2013designhartson2003cognitive and the stages of the human action model norman2013design they primarily tie to.