Collage is the New Writing:
Exploring the Fragmentation of Text and User Interfaces in AI Tools
DIS '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference
Abstract:
This essay proposes and explores the concept of Collage for the design of AI writing tools, transferred from avant-garde literature with four facets: 1) fragmenting text in writing interfaces, 2) juxtaposing voices (content vs command), 3) integrating material from multiple sources (e.g. text suggestions), and 4) shifting from manual writing to editorial and compositional decision-making, such as selecting and arranging snippets. The essay then employs Collage as an analytical lens to analyse the user interface design of recent AI writing tools, and as a constructive lens to inspire new design directions. Finally, a critical perspective relates the concerns that writers historically expressed through literary collage to AI writing tools. In a broad view, this essay explores how literary concepts can help advance design theory around AI writing tools. It encourages creators of future writing tools to engage not only with new technological possibilities, but also with past writing innovations.
This essay (1) notices a trend towards fragmented text display in recent AI writing tools, compared to traditional UIs with a single page view. (2) Conceptually, text fragmentation also occurs in literature, such as in the literary collages of avant-garde writing. (3) Investigating this connection, this essay transfers the concept of collage to the design of AI writing tools, (4) along four conceptual facets. (5) It then applies the resulting concept, referred to as Collage, in three ways – as an analytical lens on existing designs, as a constructive lens to inspire new designs, and as a critical lens on broader concerns around writing with AI.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{10.1145/3643834.3660681,
author = {Buschek, Daniel},
title = {Collage is the New Writing: Exploring the Fragmentation of Text and User Interfaces in AI Tools},
year = {2024},
isbn = {9798400705830},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660681},
doi = {10.1145/3643834.3660681},
abstract = {This essay proposes and explores the concept of Collage for the design of AI writing tools, transferred from avant-garde literature with four facets: 1) fragmenting text in writing interfaces, 2) juxtaposing voices (content vs command), 3) integrating material from multiple sources (e.g. text suggestions), and 4) shifting from manual writing to editorial and compositional decision-making, such as selecting and arranging snippets. The essay then employs Collage as an analytical lens to analyse the user interface design of recent AI writing tools, and as a constructive lens to inspire new design directions. Finally, a critical perspective relates the concerns that writers historically expressed through literary collage to AI writing tools. In a broad view, this essay explores how literary concepts can help advance design theory around AI writing tools. It encourages creators of future writing tools to engage not only with new technological possibilities, but also with past writing innovations.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference},
pages = {2719–2737},
numpages = {19},
keywords = {AI, Co-Creation, Collage, Essay, Human-AI Interaction, Literature, Natural Language Processing, Text Generation, Writing},
location = {Copenhagen, Denmark},
series = {DIS '24}
}