The Future of Handwriting

In Fall of 2021, the 100 or so students in Greg Niemeyer’s “L&S 25: Creativity in Practice” course responded to a simple prompt with urgent creativity. The prompt: Write a note from the future to the present, by hand. Many students generated innovative language systems, alphabets and even hand-drawn sound waves to speculate how handwriting might look in the future. Most common were warnings and pleas to do what we could possibly do to stop climate change, because the future will be dire.

A student writing in an L&S 25 “Creativity in Practice” section.

The theme resonated because speech-to-text, autocomplete, and other forms of technically enhanced writing erode handwriting rapidly. On the surface, it’s “just” a question of media, but when we stop to reflect how power structures are embedded in media, what’s at stake is who will write the words, ideas, goals and values of the future. When we write with machines, we delegate some of our writing power to those machines and the corporate ideals they enact. Niemeyer writes more on this Digital Illiteracy in The Way We Write. When we write by hand, we reclaim some of the power of language for our own hands and minds.

Lourdes Mucino Garcia’s Note from the Future includes graphic elements from Latin, Cyrillic, Chinese and other characher sets.

Lourdes Mucino Garcia anticipated a more streamlined, machine-readable, international alphabet with elements from many world languages synthesized into a global set of characters. Jenny Nguyen anticipated an evolution of handwriting to a kind of two-layered comic book style.

Moleskine, a notebook company that supported the course, published a story with more student work and several social media posts on the coursework.

Jenny Nguyen’s “Note from the Future”