Loïc Marleix | The rediscovery of the Lovers Communication Language

Описание: Loïc Marleix is a French independent designer specializing in systems architecture, interfaces, semiotics, and the study of glyphs. A fervent explorer of Unicode, kaomoji, and sub-internet culture, he has designed a free tool to preserve and explore the language constructed by Japanese designer Ota Yukio under the name ‘Lovers Communication System.’
​
[email protected]
​

The rediscovery of the Lovers Communication Language

Born in 1939, Ota Yukio is a Japanese designer whose work has been instrumental in making glyphs a language of everyday use. His design of the ‘Running Man’ emergency exit and the evacuation area marks have earned international acclaim.

Professor at Tama University, President of the Japan Society for Science of Signs, and Chief Director of the Sign Center of Japan, he has received several design awards and authored over a dozen books and articles on pictogram design and symbolic languages.

His book ‘ピクトグラムデザイン’ (Pictogram Design), published in 1987, ‘is part of the rise in the usage of the Japanese word emoji [...] Ota's book was one obvious, significant source of inspiration for the designers of NTT DoCoMo's i-mode phone system [...] who first released their set of 176 pictographic characters in 1999.’ (Jonathan E. Abel, 2019, Not everyone S).

While traveling around Italy alone on foot in 1964, Ota imagined a language that could be understood worldwide. Inspired by Otto Neurath's Isotype and his peers during a flourishing era of pictogram internationalization of the '60s, Ota constructed a clever pictorial language system known as the Lovers Communication System (LoCoS). From his first international presentation at the ICOGRADA conference in 1971, the support expressed by the community has motivated him to dedicate his life to his creation.

‘LoCoS was named in the hopes that the people of the world can communicate like lovers do using these symbols’ (Ota, 2018, LoCoS Visual Sign Language for Global Communication).

Ota's goal was to provide an easy-to-learn-and-remember system by proposing a language made of simple shapes and pictograms. LoCos aimed to provide a solution where meaning, shape, and sound would work together, a language where people could perceive the meaning of a sentence at a glance, ‘a collaboration between Eastern people, who use shape and meaning, and Western people, who use meaning and sound.’ (Ota, 2018, LoCoS Visual Sign Language for Global Communication).

After the publication of the first book, ‘新しい絵ことばLoCoS’ (New word-pictures LoCoS), showcasing Ota's creation in 1973 by Kodansha in Japan, he worked in early 2000 with Cecilia Macaulay and the interface designer Aaron Marcus to translate his book and build a website to discover LoCos. With Marcus, they explored integrating LoCoS as a shortcut language for mobile phones (Marcus, 2007, m-LoCoS UI), while Emoji integration in Unicode was started yet.

‘LoCoS is not complete and cannot be undertaken by a person alone[...]I strongly feel that we need a LoCoS research Group on an international scale’ (Ota, 2018, LoCoS Visual Sign Language for Global Communication).

Ota Yukio is now 84 years old and still active in preserving the memory of his creation. Praised by the design community, a wider LoCoS adoption still needs to happen to further its completion. An updated version of his book has been available since 2018, but no other resources are available for rediscovery.

Loïc Marleix has built a free web platform to offer a new audience an opportunity to discover, learn, and play with LoCoS. In this presentation, he will present the language Ota imagined, his digitalization work, and the result of new experiments and explorations.