Translator: Chris Brown Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So, in the months leading up to our big degree show,
students were given an open brief.
Essentially, we could do whatever we wanted, solve any problem we wanted.
So what was I going to create?
Well, I knew that I loved words and letter forms,
so I set my sights on inventing a new language.
But the deeper I delved into this, the more frustrated I became.
In looking at examples, I found out Esperanto was meant
to unite the whole world under one easy to learn language.
Láadan was a feminist thought experiment
created to make the world imagine what language would look like
if it had evolved from a matriarchal society.
Tolkien loved constructing languages so much
that he created Lord of the Rings
to give his Middle Earth dialects a place to exist
and not the other way around.
But it's taken me two decades just to scratch the surface of English
and chat to my grandparents in broken Mandarin.
How was I going to fabricate and manipulate a whole new grammar structure?
And what would my new symbols look like for an alphabet?
What would they represent?
Would they be sounds, or words, or concepts, and why?
And so all these questions built up and started to feel arbitrary.
And arbitrariness, that's just the opposite of good design.
And the thing is, design isn't about making things.
Craft and creativity are a huge part,
but, at it's core, it's about problem solving and communication.
So as I thought about that more,
my question morphed from ''What do I want to create?''
into ''What's a problem that's worth solving?''
So I began to consider
the rapid extinction of languages in the world today.
As fascinating as artificial languages are,
they often lack the organic history of natural ones,
which evolve over centuries
to reflect and embody a particular culture's worldview.
In a globalizing world, minority languages are often snuffed out,
and that's because they're considered politically,
economically, and socially less functional.
But value isn't always defined by function.
Think of everything you've said today
and how much of that was purely practical communication,
and how much of it was a culturally fine-tuned expression
of your thoughts and feelings and ideas and humor?
And can you even separate those two things?
So it's more than sounds and symbols.
When a language dies with it's last speaker,
a vast storehouse of human history and accumulated wisdom
is rendered inaccessible to the rest of the world
and obsolete to it's own descendants.
Take Marma, which you can see up here.
It is a minority language spoken in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh,
along with others like Mro and Chakma.
Now, some of it's old proverbs translate quite well into English,
like ''Drop by drop the pot fills, a word at a time makes a wise man.''
But what about, ''In jungle scrub the castor-oil tree is king,
any knife is keen amongst 'peen' plants''?
Some don't translate so well
because they express such a specific wisdom to that region and culture
that it's not about taking single words and finding the English equivalent
if one would even exist.
And so the translator of these proverbs, Thomas Lewin, describes his task
as transferring a delicately flavored wine from one vessel into another
with nuance being lost along the way.
Now, Marma letter forms, they evolve from the Burmese alphasyllabary,
which is so circular because it used to be written on palm leaves,
which would tear if you made straight lines.
It looks exotic to many of us here,
but in actuality, it's pretty much just as incomprehensible
to those who speak it everyday.
And that's because formal education is only available in Bangla,
which is a language alien to the Hill Tracts children.
So imagine showing up on your first day of primary school,
and your teachers are asking you questions in Icelandic,
and you look through your materials, and everything's in hieroglyphics,
and if there's an image,
it's of something that you've never seen before in real life;
things like trains, for these children who live deep in the Hill Tracts.
And because they're able to become alienated quite easily
and can't engage with confidence in their schooling,
the dropout rate is about 98 percent by tenth grade.
In that tiny two percent, Maung Nyeu, a native to the Hill Tracts,
he made it through that system and got to Harvard
where he's currently getting his PhD in education.
He's built three schools back in the Hill Tracts,
which he maintains through his nonprofit, Our Golden Hour.
You might be thinking now, ''Okay, this is a worthwhile problem,
but how are you going to save a dying language with new logos
and promotional pamphlets?''
And that's an understandable reaction, given that graphic design is usually
associated with things like selling products and promoting brands.
And that's valid, and those are issues that design does tackle brilliantly
as we we've all seen.
But it's just one application of a really versatile problem-solving approach.
But what about this scenario?
Well, the thing I love most about design is its multi-disciplinary nature.
You can apply solid design thinking to nearly any field
and pinpoint the essence, augment the impact, and resolve problems.
For me as a chronic dabbler in many things,
it's better than having a finger in every pie.
It's more like being trained as a taste tester to sample any pie
and be able to try and make it taste even better.
And that's awesome for me.
It's really fun to explore all these different fields
through something that I love.
But what about this scenario?
How was I going to solve this problem?
Because I had to create materials
for a language that I didn't know existed, a few weeks prior,
and it's a dying language,
so reference materials are pretty much non-existent.
Trying to check something against a fluent speaker in the Hill Tracts
would mean a turn around time of two weeks
because there's just no internet access;
government limits that in the Hill Tracts.
And I was also nothing close to being an educator
even though I'd been a student all my life.
Luckily my targets were primary level students
who couldn't read or write, but neither could I,
so we were pretty much on the same page on this language.
I wasn't a teacher or a linguist, but I am a typographic nerd,
and so the pleasure I find in a particularly elegant ampersand
or perfectly chiseled house number plaque is admittedly ridiculous,
but in this case it gives me a huge advantage
because what we understand about the Roman alphabet, our alphabet,
can also be applied to Marma.
Looking at these letter forms,
a designer's eye is meant to break something down,
deconstruct it, look at all the pieces
from a different perspective, from an informed perspective,
and then start piecing things back together
in a way that creates something more functional and more impactful.
So even though I wasn't able to conduct onsite research for this project,
applying this method to the Marma alphasyllabary
[I] was able to kind of make sense of their complex systems,
that they have all these consonants that you see clustered there.
And you can combine those with diacritic marks to form vowels, etc.
And so, even from my studio desk in London I was able to sort of analyze their system
and create some sort of rudimentary tools for them to use in their curriculum,
like alphabet charts and diacritic diagrams,
handwriting templates, and workbooks, stencils, stroke direction references
to show them how to write each letter form.
But while I was doodling circles and sunset diagrams and gradients,
the Hill Tracts remained a militarized zone.
And when I suggested to Maung
that we credit contributing teachers and students by name,
he had to gently remind me
that doing so might put them in real physical danger.
And so, you can see
why I was weary of involving things like color palettes and paper quality,
for fear of trivializing the task all together.
I often am haunted by this rather privileged desire
to create beautiful things because design isn't decoration,
so why are we so often more afraid of creating something ugly
than we are of creating something useless?
Placing my work between the context
of a sleek design exhibition and rural monasteries in Bangladesh,
I grappled with this question a lot.
But while there's plenty of truth
in the Modernist mantra "form follows function,"
I believe that beauty should not be dismissed,
because it's the symbiotic coexistence of purpose and aesthetic
that makes design effective.
And after all, it's the visual element of graphic design that makes a message
as powerful to experience as it is important to communicate.
Take these noun posters for example.
They're more playful than instructional.
But the children in the Hill Tracts don't usually get to see
their language written in so many different ways.
And so, by seeing them painted across the page and intertwined,
they can kind of celebrate their language in a way that they hadn't before.
Because they're growing up being told that Marma, their mother tongue,
is a useless language because Bangla is what gets them a job.
And though the latter might be true in their system,
why do we assume it's Marma that's broken and redundant
rather than the system of cultural hegemony and oppression?
In comparison, the whole world caters to my passion.
I mean, look around anywhere
and you'll see heritage of the Roman alphabet,
even the fact that Comic Sans can be some collective joke in the internet.
That's a luxury. It's a privilege, and we should treasure that.
I remember speaking to Maung for the first time,
and he told me the idea of drop down menus
full of font choices and calligraphic styles,
that just didn't seem relevant in the Hill Tracts,
where they couldn't even write their own language.
But now, because of his schools and his curriculum,
a new generation is able to spell their own name in their own language
and compare handwritings.
Now, if this seems insignificant at first, just consider that the tapestry
of any language is so much more than it's vocabulary words.
It's your dad's hilarious text messages
and your one friend's endless supply of terrible puns.
It's that soul-bearing journal you've kept since age twelve,
and that song lyric so important that you got it tattooed into your skin.
Have you ever heard the pure joy and abandon
of a gospel choir worshipping on Sunday?
The power of a political leader's speech to the nation after a tragedy?
The impossible perfection of a Shakespearean sonnet?
Think of the centuries of knowledge
stacked up right on the shelves of your local library.
And what are those things worth?
What if tomorrow the threads of that tapestry unravelled,
and English was rendered incomprehensible?
Is it just a matter of translating these things
into the next most practical language?
Every child in every culture should have the means
to perpetuate their mother tongue.
They should have a chance to celebrate it, to master it,
to create beautiful things with it, and to write their own history with it.
Recently I visited the Aleut people of St. Paul Island, Alaska,
where the Unangam Tunuu language has about 85 speakers remaining,
which isn't a lot, and I'm working on a transliteration project
But because of his relentless race against time,
it can be quite debilitating and disheartening at times.
And so, sometimes the only person in the world, perhaps,
that can bring this project into completion
and give his own ancestors' language a chance for survival,
he becomes so overwhelmed by these pressures and by his age
that he starts to forget who I am and what I'm even trying to help with.
And so, the reality of language revival
isn't as romantic and rosy as it might sound on this speech synopsis,
and it's about working towards results
that you won't fully see in your life time.
And it's certainly not about color palettes.
So I'm not here to insist that Photoshop or great typography
can single-handedly save the world or that they were meant to.
But I do believe that there's every reason
for us to channel our specific passions and skillsets into the right places,
people, projects,
all these things that can collectively bring about progress and change.
Drop by drop, the bucket fills,
and even though we can't always supply the water
resolving a leaky bucket or aiming an unaimed faucet,
that can be of great consequence, and that's the definition of design.
Thank you.
(Applause)