Language Seen: Speculative Characters

Tuesday, July 18, 2023 | 6:30 p.m.

Has ordinary text ever let you down? Maybe periods, question marks, and exclamation points just couldn’t get your meaning across? Well, what if punctation could help you clearly share your affection, snark, anticipation, or disinterest in writing? What if, in lieu of relying on smiley-faces and eggplants to make our point, new punctuation could formally articulate meaning through gesture and expression? Just as written music relies on specific symbols to designate key, volume, pacing and pauses, new letterforms — inspired by facial expressions, hand gestures, and metaphors — could better inform our visual inflection.

Mia Cinelli (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and educator. Her popular TED talk highlights the power of typography to impact our daily lives. In this Language Seen, a program series exploring the visual aspects of language, she presents Speculative Characters for Visual Inflection — a project which envisions how new characters might catalyze clearer communication through letterforms and punctuation.