Lecture - Phonological experiments through history. The bridge between societal reading struggles and type design - Conference ICTVC - Thessaloniki

Abstract

Nowadays, social design –a creative power to engage with societal struggles– is a popular activity amongst designers. Creativity holds a tremendous power to find solutions for a social problem but looking back at the history on social support that was designedly created, this was not always the case. During this lecture, the above perspective will be touched upon by the presentation of a history of phonological experiments. Throughout typographic and linguistic history, many phonological experiments have been developed to aid (moreover English) reading with correct pronunciation of letters and words. In this presentation, old phonological type experiments from four centuries ago will be compared against more recent ones, successful ones against others that failed. It will become clear that solutions that were offered in this light, were not always very successful, probably because the lack of typographic knowledge and/or skills. Pitfalls will be identified to envision new research paths. How can we expand upon our basic alphabet (for the Latin Script) to provide phonological support for reading? What is exactly the power of our convention, our typography to represent the phonological support for reading? My PhD (at READSEARCH, PXL-MAD School of Arts and Hasselt University) is embedded within this line of thinking namely, how a typeface can provide graphic support to improve the pronunciation of a language while reading or when a non-native speaker deals with utterances of a language the reader is not familiar with.