Sutton Glyphs
The visual age
Alan Stillman described human communication as three ages.
- The spoken age, from mouth to ear.
- The written age, from hand to eye.
- The visual age, from brain to screen to eye. The hand is still in that path: from hand to screen to eye.
The visual age is here, and it is still driven by mouths and hands. Speech leaves by the mouth. Sign language, typing, and drawing leave by the hand. Covering the mouth with the hand stops both exits at once. Morse code is sent by hand.
Reception is just as fixed. The eye and the ear are the two ways in. Sensors can send data straight to a machine. There is little to gain by trying to send it straight into the brain. The pathways we already have do not merely pipe information in. They transform it into something usable. Until people are built rather than born, new research into how knowledge is drawn still ends in the same place: shapes and colors in a small square, and the same question. Which shapes, and which colors?
One glyph for one idea
Work with Blissymbolics leads to a rule that has kept holding: there are no difficult concepts, only difficult explanations of simple concepts.
Language is metaphorical. The behavior of billiard balls informs us about atoms until there is a better metaphor, or until the atoms can be seen. Streams inform us about blood in a capillary until the capillary can be seen. A flow is still a flow, whether it is large or small.
A universal visual language would therefore use the same elemental glyph for a flow whether the flow is water, blood, electricity, neutrinos, or anything else that behaves like a fluid. The surroundings of the glyph can change. Arrows can curve or point another way. The elemental idea stays recognizable across disciplines and across languages, from the microscopic to the macroscopic.
Containers passing through a pipe can be blood cells carrying hemoglobin through a capillary, or trucks carrying freight through a tunnel. Modifiers distinguish a cell from a truck. Sometimes the context is enough, and the same concept does not need a new drawing.