Enriching Writing Ecosystems at
The Fifth Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants

co-located with

The 39th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2026)

Detroit, MI

The purpose of this interdisciplinary workshop is to facilitate discussion around writing assistants, thereby enhancing our understanding of their usage in writing process and predicting the consequences. To this end, we strive to bring together researchers from the human-computer interaction (HCI) and natural language processing (NLP) communities by alternating our workshop venue between HCI and NLP every year.

⬇️ Examples of new forms of human-machine collaborative writing. ⬇️

About the Workshop

Writing assistants have become increasingly multidimensional and sophisticated, fueled by advances in AI and interaction design. As this landscape expands, it is timely to consider how different underlying technologies (e.g., text analytics, LLMs), interaction designs (e.g., next-word prediction, chatbots, material interaction), and design goals (e.g., productivity, friction) fit together into broader ecosystems of tools and workflows. Future writing tools should support writers' idiosyncratic, multi-tool, and social writing processes.

In this hands-on, systems-centric workshop, we challenge the UIST community to explore and develop ecosystems of writing assistants through the lens of interoperability. Participants will engage in a highly interactive tool-swapping collaborative writing exercise where research and commercial systems are used side-by-side. Through playful provocation and intentional defamiliarization, participants will identify system interplay friction and collaboratively outline design guidelines for building adaptable writing assistants that enrich diverse workflows and integrate into lasting technological ecosystems.

Now in its fifth iteration, our workshop seeks to facilitate discussions on designing and building cohesive writing ecosystems — bridging technical systems, design values, and community paradigms. Our objectives are to bridge interdisciplinary communities; to critique the flexibility, interoperability, and normative ground of current tools; and to envision the future design and study of writing assistants amongst a flourishing landscape. In addition to HCI and NLP research, we welcome participants from fields such as the Education Sciences, English and Rhetoric, and Linguistics.

The day is built around the following activities:

• Opening and Introductions. Organizers welcome participants and provide a workshop overview. Participants briefly introduce themselves and state their expectations for the day.
• Keynote(s) details coming soon!
• Tool Swapping and Live Writing Activity. The core of the workshop is a live tool-swapping exercise modeled after collaborative party games (e.g., "Frantic Fanfic"). Participants sit at tables equipped with a curated mix of writing systems and prototypes, then continue each other's texts using a completely different interface each round — so that friction between systems can be observed in real time.
• Small Group Discussions. Tables critically discuss and document their collective tool-handling and writing experiences, assessing both technical breakdowns and the experiential effects of multiple tool usage.
• Expert Panel. A panel of interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners discusses the challenges of designing towards plurality, building on what participants have just experienced.

Participants are encouraged to bring prototypes and commercial tools on their own computers. Organizers will collect tools from past research and from open-source repositories, and will host a text-sharing application to mediate the activity.

Participate

Joining the workshop does not require a paper submission. To take part, sign up for the workshop when you register for UIST 2026. You can also register for the workshop on its own, without registering for the full conference.

We will also post a short participant form here shortly. Coming soon.

Questions? Email us at in2writing.workshop@gmail.com.

Schedule

09:00 - 09:30am	Welcome and meet-and-greet with participants
09:30 - 10:30am	Keynote (coming soon!)
10:30 - 12:30pm	Interactive tool-swapping activity
12:30 - 2:00pm	Lunch
02:00 - 3:00pm	Follow-up discussions from the group activity
03:00 - 4:00pm	Keynote (coming soon!)
04:00 - 5:00pm	Panel discussion

Speakers

Coming soon!

Organizers

You can contact the organizers by emailing in2writing.workshop@gmail.com.

Advisors

Sponsors

Interested in supporting the workshop? We would love to hear from you — please reach out to in2writing.workshop@gmail.com.