muto
For this project, we were asked to choose a system, hack it, and give it a new identity. I chose to work on Sign Language. There are approximately 70 Million people in the world that are deaf, but unfortunately, there aren’t many clear graphic representations of the language. That is what sparked my idea for the project. Having only managed to find still images of a character with arrows indicating a movement, I took it upon me to find a different way to represent the language in an image based way. Given that the time wasn’t much, I focused on 5 simple words of the British Sign Language, WHO, WHY, WHERE, WHAT, and HOW. Having struggled to find a close match to the actual sign, I decided to record my hands doing the word’s movement. the sound was then transformed using a mix of programs, which resulted in the pictogram-like designs shown. the name “muto” is the word “deaf” in italian.