A Survey of Creativity-Support Tools for Articulating Pre-Verbal Creative Intent. Mapping the Missing Hand-off, from Shown to Said

A creative idea rarely travels in one step from a diffuse, pre-verbal felt sense — a bodily awareness of “something” not yet nameable — to a finished, communicable form. It matures across a crossing marked by three landmarks: the felt, internal and wordless; shown, where the sense has been externalised — given visible, audible or tangible form — but not yet worded; and said, where it has finally been put into words. This survey maps the tools, interfaces, methods and tutors that support that crossing, and reads each by where it lands along it. Two lineages dominate, and each stops short: one externalises the felt without words, ending at shown (sketch, gesture, tangible and immersive interfaces); the other produces words directly, ending at said. What is thin is the hand-off between them — the articulation gap: support for taking a non-verbal externalisation, or a still-diffuse felt sense, and helping a maker arrive at their own words. Where words are produced, they tend to be supplied by the tool rather than found by the maker. We trace both lineages from classical roots to 2022–2025 AI-era systems, offer an autonomy-and-timing lens (own words vs supplied; early vs late intervention) that characterises how tools miss the hand-off, and set out a research agenda — entry, traversal, exit — for the middle the field has left under-served. To the question the survey opens with — can you create something you cannot put into words? — the landscape answers yes, you can make it; whether you can come to say it, in your own words, is the problem still open.