 like marginally panicked. And I'm really excited to share with you speculative characters for visual inflection. And I want to talk about how this project started. So after a particularly long but lovely day of teaching type and designing type, I got home. And I sat down on the couch next to my husband and went to which he's a very astute observer. He replied, well, that's a heavy sigh. And normally, this wouldn't have been a particularly salient comment, except for the fact that for the first time, I realized that the word used to describe the intent of my sigh was the same word we would use to describe the weight of a typeface. So my first thought was, what would a heavy sigh look like typographically or even a semi-bold sigh for that matter? And so then this led me to the next question, which was, why isn't this its own character? Which might seem like kind of a weird question, but if we think about how we communicate with each other, so much of our communication is nonverbal. It's corporeal. It's facial expressions. It's gestures. It's these small looks from across the room. And we try really hard to integrate this into our written communication. So obviously, we have things like emoticons, which first kind of rose to prominence in the 1980s, which are really just recontextualized letter forms to form these gestures or expressions or things reminiscent of faces or actions. And of course, we have emojis. And I love emojis. I think they're really great. I think they're just fantastic. I use them all the time. But I think that they lack formality in a way. I find them a bit difficult to write in a professional email. And I find that most of the time, they're really literal, albeit not always. Something that I love about typography is the tone that it creates, something that I've been referencing as visual inflection. And typographers create these in all sorts of different ways, not least of which is through our type choice. Because what is said is, of course, influenced by how it's set. And but this also happens through punctuation. Something that I love is that we can read each of these in a different way because of how it's punctuated, right? So if we think about the thanks for the period, we all know that that's like the curt way of saying thanks. That's like the thanks, right? And all of that is, I think, completely fascinating. And so the question I have is, what if we had more options? Like, what if we had an expanded character set for gesture and expression, which leads me to talk about speculative design? So for those of you who aren't familiar with speculative design, this is kind of a weird faction of design which simply asks, what if? It's thinking about designing the future. I like to think of it as a kind of design fiction. But I really like the way that Malpass talks about this, which is simply design as a medium for inquiry. And the thing about this is that we've been thinking about designing the future forever, like this is old news. We've been thinking about how to incorporate gesture and expression and metaphor into what we've been designing for hundreds of years. And so we might think case in point about the manicule. So this is an actual literal gesture drawn in the margins, popular between the 12th and the 18th century, as a way of literally pointing out what is supposed to be important. And of course, this then became its own character. We could also think about this example from Puck Magazine, Typographical Art from March 30th of 1881, a full 100 years before emoticons became popular. So here we can just see these are punctuation that are formed in certain ways to enhance the way in which we are typographically expressing ourselves. We can also think about the work of Ambrose Bierce for brevity and clarity from 1887, and which he proposes a mark for levity. So we can see here, and this is really just a parentheses turned on its side, but it's evocative of a smile. That's what it's referencing. So he's trying to tell a reader where you should laugh, where something is funny, where is there a moment to pause and understand that this is intended with humor, the Interrobang. This is one of my favorite things on the planet. In the event that you're not familiar, I'm so excited that I get to share this with you. The Interrobang was designed, proposed, by Martin K. Spector in 1962, and he was an advertising professional who realized and recognized that we are doing an exclamation point and a question mark when we have something that is really incredulous. And so he proposed this mark for incredulous questions or rhetorical questions, because we didn't have this mark, and we should, which I think is really brave, to propose a new mark that hadn't existed yet and say, why don't we have this? Which then sets historic precedents for things like the sarcastic font, circa 2004, of the sarcastic font movement, which is simply italicized in the opposite direction as a way to create this kind of type tones that people know when you're being sarcastic, because it's really hard to be sarcastic on the internet. Other ways to remedy this problem, courtesy of Adam Stanway, include these sarcasticies. So we can introduce what kind of tone this is supposed to take along with the happy mark, which I think is just delightful, because this shares the fact that you're trying to say something with good intent. You mean it in a really happy way. And so he designed these new characters, among others. And so this is not a comprehensive list, but clearly I'm not the first person to be thinking about this stuff. And all this brings me back to the heavy sigh, because we have these things that we use anyway typographically. And these kind of serve as both a stopgap and a desire path. This shows the fact that when we don't have these characters, we put things in place of where they should be. And so if we're going to do this, I think that we could do it better. So I want to talk a little bit about what informs the work that I actually made. And first and foremost, this starts with physical gestures. And if you can't tell, I'm really into physical gestures. I was raised by an Italian immigrant. This is part of the thing. And so things here, which we use in everyday conversation, things like air quotes, the thumbs up, expressions for things like disgust or uncertainty. We might also think about things like social symbols, sound, and shape as being really influential to this body of work. So I recently came to learn about something called the buba kiki effect. And I think this is just amazing. Researchers have repeated this experiment multiple times and shown people these two shapes and have asked which one is kiki and which one is buba. So think about it for just a second. Because something like 92% to 98% of you in this room are going to come to this conclusion. What this shows is that there is a non-arbitrary connection between shape and sound. And so something that has that kind of harsh sound to it, we expect to be a bit more jagged. Whereas something that's a little bit rounder, we expect to have those kind of smooth shapes. And I think this is fascinating also because how it pertains to letter forms. And this was really influential, thinking about the noises that we make in kind of nonverbal communication and how sharp or sudden they may be and what they may need to look like as new characters. This also brings me to pace of speech because the way in which we say something or think something is influenced by how we're reading it. So obviously a hyphen an n-dash and an m-dash, which we all love, not just because we love our esoteric typographic knowledge, but because these are actually evocative of how much space we need to read or say something. Hyphens don't need to be that long because they're just keeping words together. Whereas something like through or a change of thought actually needs to be longer, which is why these are not the same character. Also, we might think about social symbols and how we could actually assign new meaning to new shapes. Most people in this room know that of course an ampersand is just an evolved ligature of et, right, the Latin for and, but most people using this don't know this and yet we assign this symbol, this meaning anyway. So it doesn't seem like that big of a leap to say we're gonna have a new symbol and give it some new meaning. And of course, we had to think about, I had to think about how this could work in terms of feasibility and context because these new characters I was thinking about wouldn't just be used in a digital typeface, but they would have to be written out in conversation. And so there came a point at which my studio looked way too much like the Unabomber shack because I had all of these like scribbles like a tape to my walls. It was a really great time. Thinking about how it is you could write this out without breaking your train of writing and also I thought about the context where they would need to live in terms of type. And I am unironically proposing Helvetica. It's ubiquitous, everybody knows it. This would be a great place for them to live. And so I really am excited to share this new expanded character set with you but I do wanna have one small caveat is that I recognize that not all gestures, not all expressions are universal, right? So this is within a specific Western cultural context in which I have proposed this within my own and it is neither meant to be exhaustive nor exclusive, so with that being said, this is the effecticon. This is a new character meant to represent love and affection. So it's kind of like a hug and it's kind of reminiscent of like the social symbol of a heart which is something that you could use in context to tell someone that you mean what you're saying with love and affection. And I have to tell you the heart is my most commonly used emoji. There's the shrug sign. Everyone has sat in a meeting where you are entirely sure that you have no idea what's going on and you look across the room and one of your colleagues also goes, and you feel so much better because you're not alone. This is a glyph that we could use when you would like to use this in line with other texts or on its own as a signal of uncertainty. There's the elaticon which is the excited wiggle which you could use as a preface to what it is you're about to say. There's the disgust mark which I think as being a substitute for bleh or yuck or ugh. So it's kind of like a frown and kind of like something that might be kind of dripping or maybe kind of like a tongue but is generally kind of gross but has that kind of sharpness and that kind of suddenness that we might think about where we would use a different noise normally. There is then the awkward pause which is just a long comma. There's the frustration point which I thought about as I was making this, both the act of writing it as a kind of frustration but also the kind of semantics of the actual glyph itself. So here this feels a bit gristled. It feels frustrated. We all want to send this in an email. There is the anticipation point. So I use but also simultaneously low the double exclamation point, right? So we use that because we are just so excited but there needs to be a better solution and so I've proposed this ligature of an M dash and an exclamation point as a way to show excitement with a kind of urgency without it being a redundancy. There is the agree mark which of course is indicative of the thumbs up as a way to show solidarity or acceptance. There is the cringe mark. This is something that is sharp and somewhat panicked and a bit like a frown as a way to show a wince or pain or embarrassment. There is the disinterest mark which is both an eye roll, a scoff, a dismissive hand gesture. As a way to show that you are completely and utterly over it. One of my favorites are snark marks. This is indicative of making this gesture, right? As a way to show that you're saying something mockingly. So this is a way to separate this from normal quotes, right? Like this makes sense. Everybody does this. Everybody knows what this means. There's no reason why we shouldn't have a character for this and speaking of quotes, these are perhaps the most obvious but I felt the need to investigate them anyway of thinking about how we could quote things that have eyebrows and so these are worried quotes. These are angry quotes. These are skeptical quotes. And originally I imagined these living on like opposite sides of words but that didn't really work with the proximity of how we anticipate eyebrows work together. So this I think gives really nice tone to asking something if you are inquisitive or worried or upset. And this provides just a little bit more tone so that we know exactly what is being asked or inquired after. And of course all this leads me back to the exasperite icon. This is the heavy sigh. So thinking about something like a crescendo and a day crescendo or what it means to take a deep breath and then release it or something that feels a little bit like a warning but also thinking about the pace of speech which you would need to accurately portray the space required for a heavy sigh in conversation. So something about these characters and something about speculative design is that so often it's relegated and reserved for objects and architecture because it's supposed to be that we would have greater imagination of context of use. We can use an object. We can live in a house. So I don't see any reason why we can't apply this to type and I felt really fortunate that I just was able to exhibit this work in a small solo exhibition in Lexington, Kentucky where I live, which I'm really thrilled about. And as I was designing this exhibition I was thinking about how do I frame this experience for people who are walking through? How does a general audience who may have no idea about typography and even less idea about speculative design understand this body of work? And so in terms of speculative design for imagining a future we have to think about world building. What other information could we include to make this seem plausible? How could this not seem like such a leap? And so something that I included was a writing guide. How we might teach children how to write these new characters in school. And because I could just hear it I was really ready for someone to be like, well you know the keyboard is full. No it's not. There's room I promise. Thinking about where we could possibly put these new characters so that they would make sense in our everyday conversation of typing. And even beyond this thinking about where else could these live, right? Of course they're proposed in Helvetica but what do these characters look like in Futura, in Baskerville? How do we give more context to these particular glyphs and how do we give extended character to these characters? I know I love puns. So the point of this, right? Is that thinking, as soon as I did this show people came up to me and were like, where do I buy it? How can I get this on my phone? And the point of this work is not like massive implementation, right? Or even mass production of these kinds of works because I think of speculative design as having value in and of itself. I really like the concept of discursive design. It's meant to prompt a conversation. It's made to get us thinking about what's next because even if it did exist that would be fabulous but that would then be its own thing. And I think making this work, I know, making this work matters because how we talk to each other now more than ever is really important. I think that the way in which we communicate with each other with empathy and clarity and nuance and adding more humanity to our typography is incredibly important to say what it is we mean to say and to say it really, really well because essentially we're barreling into the future whether we like it or not. And so I think now would be a good time to think about what we want that future to look like. Thank you.