as the final deliverable for this course, students are asked to write an essay. i was confused enough to ask why in class, since the reason wasn’t mentioned anywhere on the syllabus. sharon de la cruz said:
to get people to reflect on making methodology; be aware of the context; and practice communication (of the experiment we’d conduct). the objective is to give people a chance to ‘scratch their curiosity’.
brief is here.
i had already done something like this in undergraduate-study (paper here). so, i used this opportunity to explore a few lines of thought:
- a creative-practitioner works with feelings. they are — both — working material and a parameter to gauge success in communication.
- when making big things & moving fast, like we do at itp, it is easy to forget that little decisions compound into big differences between intended communication of feelings, and the feelings that are ultimately perceived.
- to (experimentally) prove these differences, i wish to explore the differences in how a written piece of communication in english feels, when read in different cases (letter-case, uppercase, lowercase).
- i’ve been wanting to write a piece on why i write in lowercase letters. it was originally influenced by herbert bayer’s why we write everything in small letters & shobhan, and remained as i saw the differences in the perceiver’s feelings when they received my messages (in comparison to the same message sent in sentence-case).
In July 1925, these ideas ignited like a bomb at the Bauhaus. Attempts to start a new unit document. The school’s business papers - all of which have long been known - appeared without Capital letters among public protests, but masters and students kept them for a lifetime. At the instigation of Herbert Bayer (Herbert Bayer Hans Maria Wingler, 9.3.1963: “Ivind Gropius to introduce a system of writing in lower case at the Bauhaus.” Documents Herbert Bayer, BHA Berlin.) has agreed to Gropius - but Not without teeth grinding. (The elimination of the capital letters was based on “extreme standardization friends,” according to Gropius in a lecture, about which the Paper newspaper on 10.7.1926 reported. He also described the “fight against capital letters” as a “stuck horse of the students” there.) His objections will have ended similarly to those of Dissent between Moholy and him: “But I don’t want to interfere with your typographic intentions, otherwise the unity will be lost.” (W. Gropius to L. Moholy-Nagy on 14.08.1925 [Critique of the sentence in Bauhausbuch 4], correspondence for the production of the Bauhaus books, estate Walter Gropius, BHA [hereinafter squinted as “correspondence”)
https://www.grafikdesign-geschichte.de/texte/bauhausb%C3%BCcher/#swap