Iconspeak
Harnessing the power of icons to communicate in foreign lands
I love travelling. Being an Indian, I have travelled a lot in India and recently also outside India. And every place I have gone to has a local language of it’s own.
I always wished I could speak in Telugu while living in Hyderabad to easily explain the directions to a cab driver or speak in Mandarin while giving order in a restaurant in Singapore.
But unfortunately I cannot and tools like Google Translate still have a long way to go. Also, such tools are useless if you are in a remote place with no Internet connectivity. In such cases, your best bet is to try and explain something to a local person by using hand gestures because even English doesn't work in most places.
But in this age of computers and mobile phones all around us, we still haven’t understood the potential of a common design language used in icons and emojis throughout the world for everyday communication.
Fortunately, an idea came into the mind of George Horn, a Swiss traveller who was travelling through Asia in 2013 on “cheap motorbikes” with his friend Florian Nast. They partnered with Stefan Streit and in late 2015 and they created their brand Iconspeak.
After having had some snake for dinner we sat down in a bar with two Mekong-buckets, which is a bottom half of a large PET bottle, filled with a wild mix of spirits. We reflected on our past days on motorbikes in a foreign country and culture. Many times we were confronted with a language barrier that was only to be overcome by drawing signs, symbols or icons on a piece of paper, map, or into the dirt. We thought it would be great to have an essential set of icons with you, permanently, so that you could just point on whatever you need — and people would understand. Soon the notepad was pulled out again and we started listing more or less essential icons that would have been of great help during not just ours, but basically anyone’s trip.
-Iconspeak Company Blog
https://iconspeak.world/blogs/main/64643525-chapter-1-from-dirt-to-shirt
Some of the early ideas…
…which resulted into the T-shirt for travellers.
They created a useful T-shirt printed with 40 universal icons, perfect for those occasions when you don’t speak the local language. Soon, they also introduced other products like caps, bags, tank tops, etc based on the same concept. The prices start at $22.
This is an innovative idea which points towards the potential use of modern software design language as a means of communication between people who don’t speak the same natural language.
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