Reading is Unnatural
Wouldn’t you know? Reading is entirely unnatural! Putting a book in your face and staring at strange symbols on a page is the most unnatural thing in the world! And yet, it has become the most common practice throughout the years that we humans have developed the written language. It is learned, activating neural pathways in our brains that we wouldn’t otherwise unlock if we were still primitive.
A lot of these crazy 8 designs were made with a single notion in mind: books. I wanted to add a book in there somewhere, giving reference that reading, most of the time, means that you’re going to be flipping through a book. The first two designs didn’t include a book, but as the idea settled in my mind, I thought it was a genius idea to include the concept of reading in this design. I was torn between the last three designs during my process, but overall decided to use the larger book, giving it the center stage in my creation. I wanted to communicate this design as efficiently as possible.
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Unlike spoken language and communication, which is inherently natural for all creatures on planet Earth, no other creature learns how to read like humans do. Written language is not necessarily a requirement for survival, as long as you know how to speak, and therefore, not something we have evolved to develop as naturally as verbal speech.
For my design theory, I have made a project that reflects the idea that reading is unnatural. The project demonstrates the theory at hand by producing an open book surrounded by flames, the reader wearing a pair of glasses and staring at the viewer with vines hanging down from the top of the poster board. In this demonstration, I used something natural (fire) and something unnatural (reading) as a way to portray that reading often infiltrates the natural world, by being on fire.
I had several different ideas for this project but I thought that using fire, something natural, to burn something as unnatural as a book — which directly ties into burning the prospect of reading. I thought this was a good representation of hinting at the fact that reading and the written language, in general, is an unnatural concept that we have learned and developed over time as a form of communication. This has allowed me to settle on the final prototype, which consists of the burning book and the pair of bespectacled eyes reading it, to promote this theory that reading is unnatural.
The final product for this project consists of a glitched version with what looks to be pages of a book in a different language in the background. This is meant to portray the ‘weirdness’ of reading in general. These are all pages, in different languages that I cannot read and you probably cannot read, either. Yiddish and Latin are showcased on the front of the book, which describes how different languages in the written form look ‘strange’, compared to one another. The glitches are meant to suggest that the brain is ‘glitching’ trying to read, and the fire shown interacts as a ‘natural’ visor to the unnatural (which is reading).
I conducted a survey that was meant to portray this theory to 3 unsuspecting test-takers. From my results, it seems that neither of them, despite varying age groups and interests, had no idea what the concept even meant. Describing it to them yielded similar reactions, where all of them decided that no, they had not heard of such a concept before. I thought this was an interesting thought while I was reviewing these responses, more specifically for one of the survey takers who has an aptitude in art and design, yet only just now heard of Reading is Unnatural. I concluded that they were all neutral to my design and that I would need to take the steps to resonate something a little more meaningful to someone who has never heard of this concept before.
It is time to teach the world that reading is unnatural!
