 Okay, so, hey, so good to be back in my hometown Minneapolis for TypeCon. My name is Kelsey Elder, and for the next 20 minutes, we're gonna look into the language we use to talk, describe, and critique typographic work, trace how it got there, figure out the expectations a gaze might hold, and speculate ways to develop an alternative lexicon in those that spirit of the hot buzzwords in academia right now, diversity and inclusion. Why? Well, because design, typography, and typeface designs, these things are epicenters for mean-making. These fields are often seen or being argued for as a mirror to society, since so often they respond to it or inform it in some way. This frames our students studying to be typographers and ourselves as more than four makers, but as cultural producers. We know this, this conversation has been happening for a while, and we know, we know, but the relationship between our field and society and culture could be visualized as a feedback loop. When I began teaching, I was asking myself, what is it that I value that I have been afforded through my education at MCAT and Cranbrook and Reading that I want my students to learn and value and be afforded to and exposed to as well? And for me, this question always returned to language, maybe more specifically, articulation, because articulation could encompass any ability to publish one's narrative, visual, verbal, textural, auditory, et cetera, broad definition of articulation. But more to the point of this talk, language and articulation means someone's ability to just talk about work and talk about one's philosophy or values about this relationship that our field has with this production and performance of culture. So if this is something that I'm valuing, entering inside my classroom, that I want my students to learn and value and be exposed to as well, how do I foster an awareness of this relationship in an inclusive manner with an inclusive lexicon that is not biased by my perspective and is self-defined by my student? And more urgently, my freshman year teaching, I'm like, how and when and does any of this get answered? Crit, man, Crit is like ubiquitous with art school, okay? I love this, but I began thinking maybe this is the time to address some of these concerns I was asking myself, because our role during those in-class discussions and conversations is increasingly closer today as moderator than sole author. And that equalizing of ownership is just as important as anything else I'm going to say, because it opens up the door for new possibilities and provides an access point for our students to interject with facets of their own known lived experiences which are immediately on par and equaled with the validity of anything given from the institution itself. That flattening of hierarchy that allows for students to add to class material with their own interests, passions, research and tastes is one of the first steps we can take to be an inclusive inside of our classroom because it changes what our class provides access to for ourselves, for that student and for their peers. That leveling of hierarchy enriches what I call a magic mix. And that magic mix is a space where students can learn to articulate it. Okay, but even with this updated sense of spirit, I was finding the underlying premise and language of critique was still largely for lack of a better term problematic. How do we foster an awareness of that relationship design has with the production and performance of culture in an inclusive manner with an inclusive lexicon for our students if the terms in our critiques haven't changed for a while? So let's really get to the meat of this. The content of what we say in the way that we talk about typey typey kind of work often bounces between a couple of extremes. On one side is something we might loosely title for now, history, tradition and precedence. History is not the best word for this, which will come later, bear with me. But history is the most commonly associated stuff of the field itself. In my head, this realm is easiest to quantify because we can point to it and name it easier. And we don't have to defend it as a valid way of talking or critiquing because it's been so academically and historically rooted and thus legitimized. And if we think about these two realms as extremes that the trajectory of our conversations is traversing through, on the other end is something loosely titled originality. And that's kind of the taste side, the subjective side that accounts for things or context from society and culture which are situated outside or external to the traditional canon of the field itself. And this model of talking is seemingly okay when considering diversity and inclusion because your stuff can fill that thing and my stuff can fill that stuff and then their stuff can fill that stuff. But whose questions and whose tastes are filling these things? The truth is if we really interrogated this that these two realms are filled with expectations. We expect certain stuff to be in them and certain stuff not. And those expectations that we come into that conversation with, those expectations are built from things that we grew up seeing and interacting with because of our socioeconomic privilege, class and locality. Those expectations historically have always nearly perpetuated exclusion and bias. Man, how do we get here in the first place? So we know that the material and historical legacy of type largely influenced, produced and defined those terms in the language that we use to describe it. Of course. But an affect of that is that typographic work has had just as long of a history of exclusion as being argued for, critiqued, debated in conversation with in some way the Western history related to the field itself. Using the same terms that we're using today, the same expectations largely that we're using today and the same trust that we have today. And although the field of type has shifted dramatically to include other bodies, the language has largely remained fixed. We use terms daily without considering current socio-semantic context of that specific word for certain communities, systems, hierarchy. I still hear type being talked about in gendered and bodied problematic ways. Man, and that sucks because of course, words have power in the ones that we are choosing to put on our curriculums and in our syllabies and project sheets and especially the ones that we use during in-class conversations matter immensely to those bodies present. But it's just so tricky to figure out how to start addressing this thing inside of our classroom, especially because type as a whole is so entwined with its past. But it matters because we are dealing with the power of language in nearly every aspect of our field. Design after all communicates something. Emphasizing the building of an inclusive lexicon for the future face of design because we know those skills of articulation will transfer endlessly for that individual is just as critical for the expansion of our field as anything else that we can tend with. But it is difficult to divorce from tradition. I love that stuff too. And the issue at hand is all the worse though because that tradition is so often dished out in a siloed timeline sequence linear narrative. A linear storytelling which narrows the canon's gaze in an attempt to reduce an endlessly complex thing, our history, into something that is easy to teach, but I think more importantly, it's been easier to assess inside of our classroom. The truth is the timeline of type is so nuanced, interwoven with developments of society, culture, industry, religion and values. It's punctuated by these moments, events, advances and happenings that are yet internal but more excitingly external to the field itself. To flatten and simplify this history, design's history in a way of this manner does a disservice to our students in the field itself because it narrows the possibilities of what worlds might collide inside of it. And just as worrisome, it narrows the possibilities of the spaces and bodies we might show our students in the spirit of inclusivity and diversity. In the queer art of failure, J. Jack Halberstam poses that the queer art of failure turns on the possible, the improbable, the unlikely and the unremarkable. It quietly loses and in losing it imagines other goals. Queer studies offers a way to imagine alternatives to hegemonic systems. I love this line from Jack, especially when considering it pointed to type. This framing offers a lens through which we might interrogate the fuzzy bounds and standards and language in terms of type today. So in the spirit of imagining alternatives, here is one take. This base diagram is intended to assist in visualizing how our field of type intersects dynamically with other facets. The implied space is infinite, ever expanding, forming outward as the depth of time tracks. Inside this multidimensional space, we can situate our own interests endlessly and envision them in combination with other things. Things plotted inside this framework are dynamic in shape and locality. They might have collided at some point in the past. Maybe these things are gonna collide in the future. Most of the things that we plot inside this space probably don't only reside to one quadrant or one arena but are most likely ratios of the diagrams descriptors. In here, the idea is orbit. I got my sock. Orbit socks on. So mentally mapping and finding routes to push facets of our lived experience, even if seemingly way outside of the expected gaze of design, back into gravity of the work being described or reviewed. Articulation. That visualized space is a rough but moldable landscape for a conversation or a view or description to map and traverse through. Using a shifting gaze, it became my goal to answer those questions I had circling to pull an inclusive review of typographic or design material from this model. In the shared spirit though, between my students and all seriousness, that critique in my classroom is a language laboratory. I began literally including diagrams like this on my syllabi project sheets. Mostly to give a few talking parameters to in-class reviews and discussions that we're no longer gonna call critiques because that is exclusionary from the start. But it's a practice of helping and facilitating an imagining of an incredibly tacit thing, the field of type for our students. A mental mapping of the range of possibilities of any given thing, even when that thing might seem unnameable at that point. We've established, well, I've established that I want students interjecting with their stuff. So how am I doing this for my tenure review and all of that stuff? Encouraging students to imagine these overlaps in orbit provides a way for them to interject. It provides a way for them to consider the possibilities of any given project, brief, while interjecting their own research, interests, and passions in life experiences because it gives them a way of defending it, right? They can articulate it immediately inside this model or try to, learn to. For us as educators, it might provide a space for us to form new goals and learning objectives. And this speculation of potential content and potential alternatives for our studios matters immensely when we are considering ways to be inclusionary. To that end, let's go back to this one. Those extrema, privately described, likely need a reconsideration because when we're talking about those orbits, our language is still probably bouncing between these two extremes. More than likely, this idea is still at play. Maybe it's better though to describe these things as internal, still encompassing things like history and precedent and external, things still related to culture and context. But these realms have to be permeable. They have to be thought of as permeable. Things that are once been excluded or otherwise ill-legitimized. If the expected gazes of these realms don't open, I promise you the language of our critiques and our terms that we use will be obliviously exclusionary. And it will be so because the language will have never been challenged to adapt or be inclusionary of concerns from and by voices historically out of the gaze. The less rich those sides are, the weaker our ultimate critical lexicon is gonna be. And the less likely that that student leaving my classroom has something and has been exposed to something that I cherish. Language, articulation. Yo, we don't teach in a vacuum, okay? So of course how radical these shifts are and things plotted and experimented with inside my classroom to find a more inclusive lexicon are likely massively dependent on context, okay? Are we talking high school students, grads? Is it at MCAD? Is it at Virginia Commonwealth University? Purchase college? How about up at RISD? Is it a course studio, a theory course? What about an upper level type design elective at a public mission school? Okay, let's set the stage. Class curtains open. How can the letter form become a historical site of significance? Yo, the expectations will show hard on first blush because the students jump to Western tradition without even naming it. So let's start there. We're talking Latin's historical precedent. We're talking proportions, broad-div and brush and all that good stuff. But let's bring up why those are the expectations as we are drawing them. And again, why is it that it's that history that we're talking about and expecting to see here? And yes, let's talk a bit about that history to provide access and we're not trying to reinvent the wheel completely. But those expectations, let's list everything that's there and then ask what we aren't seeing. Let's talk more about that sticky word of history as we learn techniques. Does it have to be from a public's history to be legitimized as history? What is meaningful about a personal one? How can I articulate my self-definition of history? The prompt is simple and loaded with fuzzy peripheries intentionally. How can the letter form become a historical site of significance? This conversation that happens through this course I have found, though touchstoneing on traditional concerns isn't linear and that's perfect. To teach for multiplicity means that we are trying to present without bias, without linearity and provide access to divergent narratives. We are aiming to not be a gatekeeper of what floats as valid or legitimate inside of these realms. Students can take a simple prompt and make some pretty type, type, type stuff. They might sample from a decade, an archive of ephemera maybe call all typefaces produced at a certain moment or a certain place. They may call or describe it as a love letter and owed to a sampling a mixtape or maybe a time capsule. All of this is intended to flip and provide another extrema towards the traditional critique framework. Having vernacular failed forms legitimized in the same review conversation with traditional type dismantles the tradition of othering especially related to failed, queried forms. Vernacular type as I call it. But methodologies of articulation is the goal. How is this historical site of significance situated in itself in orbit? And how is that orbit providing a framework to review or talk about this work? And how are the letters that we are looking at all across the classroom in orbit with one another? Is this one good? Is this one important? Often, at least inside my classrooms, we are discussing how the work is situating and wanting to be reviewed because there is a difference between making a good typeface that is well constructed and spaced and making an important one that might adhere to conventions of craft but primarily aims to address, preserve, critique or somehow call to the extraordinary conditions that are outside of the letter form itself as we see here. When all of those concerns come in into that making laboratory, when letter forms become performative bodies, the language in terms of type are tested. Using terms like systems, when in combination with thinking about the letter form as a body, simply no longer works because that word is linked to too many histories of oppression. But it's a tricky zone to be in. And if we debate in the, but and often we debate in the classroom about if it matters, if there is a better word and how we can be more clear in our intentions. We talk about if we can reclaim that word in some way. But the goal is that we are attempting to be more aware in all senses of the power, potential, trust and privilege of the published typographic letter form. To finish, I love that writing from Jack Halberstam so much because it suggests or proposes failure as a loss in a form of currency and value and meaning itself. A new way to think about capitalism. And I want to end with that suggestion of failure as a goal unto itself because it is so antithetical to the tradition of critique itself and is another way to push our lexicons through. When does a letter form fail to be a letter form still? How are we framing these conversations and was it that we value that we've been afforded that we want someone in our classroom to be afforded to as well? I'm not talking about how to use the pen tool here. What words or phrases are often used to repress, othered or invalidate historically excluded communities? Is there a better term or how can we be accountable for those terms? In the language and words we pick are we comparing or talking about work in absolutes when subjective is at hand? Where does it sit? And how can we be aware and cite our influence and bias in these settings? What is the purpose of critique anyways? Ultimately, who or what are these conversations serving? Me, the individuals inside this classroom, the future of design? I have no idea. I have no Buzzfeed top 10 ways to do this, okay? I actually am gonna end here. But I do know that there's much more that could be done, especially in an open access resources forward format so that we are leaving this place scout's honor better than when we found it for the future face of academics entering into this mess too. So please hit me up and let's collaborate. Thanks.