Designing language that does not want to be fully understood
Most design education assumes that language exists to clarify. Letters must resolve into words, words into meaning, meaning into message. Legibility is treated as a moral good, and misunderstanding as a flaw to be corrected. Within this logic, the task of typography is to disappear: to serve language by making it transparent, efficient, and obedient to reading.

This project begins from a refusal of that assumption.

I am interested in forms of language that resist being fully understood—not because they fail, but because they refuse. Languages that delay meaning, scatter it, fold it back into form, or distribute it across gesture, rhythm, material, and memory. In these forms, unreadability is not the absence of sense, but a different mode of sense-making.

To encounter such language is not to decode a message, but to negotiate with it. The eye hesitates. The body adjusts. Recognition arrives partially, or not at all. Meaning is no longer delivered; it is approached.

This refusal of immediate comprehension is not neutral. Demands for clarity are often demands for control. To be legible is to be classifiable, searchable, and governable. In contrast, opacity has long functioned as a cultural strategy: in ritual, in poetry, in coded writing, in marginalized or suppressed languages. What cannot be easily read cannot be easily captured.

Typography sits precisely at this tension. As a system, it promises order, repeatability, and standardization. As a practice, it is haunted by the instability of writing itself: variation, slippage, interpretation, misreading. Every letter is both a form and a memory; every script carries histories of power, exclusion, and adaptation.

My practice explores this unstable zone. Through drawing, coding, analogue tools, scanning, repetition, and deliberate constraint, I work with writing as a physical act rather than a transparent carrier of meaning. Lines tremble. Letters stretch, collapse, fragment, or drift toward asemic gestures. Language becomes something that can be touched, strained, or interrupted.

In these moments, reading slows down. The viewer does not consume the text but lingers with it. What emerges is not confusion, but attention—an awareness of how meaning is usually taken for granted, how quickly it is expected to arrive, and how uncomfortable its absence can be.

This discomfort is productive. It reveals that understanding is not a binary state but a spectrum, shaped by culture, familiarity, power, and desire. To design language that does not want to be fully understood is therefore not an aesthetic provocation alone; it is an ethical one. It asks who is allowed to speak clearly, who must remain legible, and who benefits from opacity.

Rather than resolving these tensions, this research chooses to remain within them. It treats writing as a site of struggle, where form and meaning continuously negotiate without final agreement. The aim is not to invent a new universal language, but to foreground the conditions under which language becomes unstable, resistant, or alive.

In doing so, this project understands design not as problem-solving, but as a form of inquiry—one that thinks through marks, gestures, systems, and failures. Meaning is not eliminated, but redistributed. It appears in fragments, rhythms, textures, and absences.

What matters here is not whether the language is fully understood, but whether it is felt, encountered, and questioned.