It’s telling that we usually can identify sets of marks as writing even when we’re illiterate in the script in question. For all their diversity, most extant writing systems are similar: orchestrations of linear figures on blank ground arranged in lines. There’s a basic analogy in these writing systems to the streaming nature of oral language. How does writing reflect basic attributes of the human imagination? Would differently-configured cognitive and communicative systems reveal themselves in remarkably different ways of writing?
The design blog Ministry of Type recently posted about the webcomic Automata, which tells the story of a human detective and his robot partner in a world where people and androids live uneasily together in society. MoT blogger Aegir Hallmundur draws our attention to “Clickwise,” the language of the automata, which is wonderfully evoked in a barcode-like script tricked out with diacritical negative dots and channels.
What sort of writing system would appeal to the android mind? The barcode (which I wrote about in another MoT-inspired post) seems like a handy starting point. Robot readers would likely value algorithmic concision, information density and texture, and the rhythm and prosody of metadata (which one can imagine it the business of those dots and channels to convey; in a machine language, metadata might well be the equivalent of stress and inflection, akin to the several tones of a language like Chinese).
Automata is written and drawn by the artists Gabe and Tycho, and appears at Penny Arcade.
