Shaping Thought
Through their interface, writing tools shape how we think and what we write. These rules feel normal to us because we are used to them, but they were designed and they shape our behavior through their design.
Shaping Thought makes these invisible rules visible: users can break them and build their own writing tools. By changing the rules, new ways of writing and thinking emerge.
Note: role labels apply to all genders.
Role
Concept Research
UX / Interaction Design
Prototyping
Web Development
Branding
Timeframe
February 2026 - June 2026
The tool's website
For a few years now I have been meditating a lot. In the kind of meditation I do, you observe your thoughts: how they come up, move and disappear again.
At the same time I journal every day and get my thoughts out of my head. Through both practices I became aware of a difference:
Thinking is fragmentary, chaotic and overlapping.
Writing, on the other hand, fixes thoughts and puts them into a linear sequence.
So writing does not record our thoughts neutrally, it changes them.
Thinking is chaotic, writing is ordered
I started building experimental writing interfaces to explore this tension between thinking and writing. My first experiment: the cursor keeps moving, whether you write or not. When you write nothing, gaps become visible and the timing of thinking becomes visible.
Using the tool, I noticed I suddenly wrote differently. The moving cursor put me under pressure, I wrote faster to avoid leaving gaps. A single changed rule changed how and what I thought.
From there the direction was clear: I wanted to explore what happens to thinking & writing when you change the rules of writing interfaces.
First experiment: the cursor keeps moving
To know which rules I could break, I first had to understand which rules are there at all and how they came to be. I began to look at language & writing as technology: how language shapes thinking and how today's digital interfaces became what they are.
A conversation with media theorist Prof. Bruhn helped here: McLuhan's idea that the medium matters more than its content. The tool does not just carry content, it also shapes how that content is produced and understood. His example was the typewriter: because correcting was hard, you had to finish a sentence in your head before it went onto the paper. So the rules of the typewriter changed how people thought.
Our modern tools are the opposite of the typewriter: at any moment you can delete, copy, rearrange, undo. Every letter appears instantly, editable and deletable, and traces of editing disappear. These rules only feel neutral because we are used to them. Yet they were designed to make writing more flexible and efficient.
Inspired by my research, I started experimenting right away. I wanted to loosen rules, bring back old constraints, exaggerate existing ones and invent new ones. What happens if the cursor behaves differently? If text disappears? If editing gets harder? If pauses, hesitation or distraction become visible?
Over the next weeks I built almost 30 experiments, used them myself and let others write with them, to see whether the changes had an effect.
One tool I still use often shows only the current letter, everything else is blurred. I journal with it on my computer, especially in cafés. It gives me privacy and I can keep writing without constantly rereading or judging, and without anyone reading along.
The tool is made of several parameters you can change and combine to build your own tool
Design-wise, I deliberately chose a single typeface, so the focus stays on the new rules and not on the choice of typography. Instead of hundreds of fonts, users only set how the text feels, like serif or sans-serif.
A variable typeface fit perfectly: one typeface with parameters you can combine, exactly the logic of the tool. My choice was Arizona by ABC Dinamo. And because the whole project is about text, I built every element from the typeface itself, even the icons are made of text characters.
The entire design is built from a single variable typeface: Arizona by ABC Dinamo
The tool does not stop at setting the parameters. Users give their rule set a short recorded preview, a name and writing prompts, and save it as their own writing tool. Every configuration becomes a tool you can use and share.
In the end this was the decision that made the most sense to me: not to design one final writing tool, but a tool to create many, each a different way of writing and thinking.
For me, Shaping Thought connects to a bigger question in my practice: how do interfaces shape human experience? A question I will keep exploring.
A tool to build and share writing tools.
