Suse Miessner: Urban Alphabets

Connecting Cities: Participatory City 2014

SUSE MIESSNER (BASED IN HELSINKI)
URBAN ALPHABETS, 2014

The idea of the Urban Alphabets project is to show inhabitants and tourists of a particular city how special and unique that city is. Using the Urban Alphabets smartphone app, participants make up their own version of their city’s alphabet. At the same time all letters are geo-tagged and uploaded to the project website (ualphabets.com). All letters from the city are used to generate the city’s custom alphabet, which is then displayed on the website. The project uses smartphones, the website, media facades, and tablets to allow participants to play with the language they have created, even allowing them to construct messages with their own alphabet, called Urban Postcards
The main aim of the Urban Alphabets project is to raise awareness of the beautiful minute detail so often missed in urban surroundings, and to encourage participants to look at their city in a new way: Using letters as graphic symbols for the visual identity of a city.

Film by Xar Lee