Even when you’re reading, apparently. The folks at RMIT University have designed a typeface that is hard to read – on purpose:
Sans Forgetica is more difficult to read than most typefaces – and that’s by design. The ‘desirable difficulty’ you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing.
Yeah, not a great deal in that video. Melissa Breyer of Treehugger thinks it’s the shit:
I love that this is so simple – and it is a great example of how design can improve things with minimal effort on the user’s part. But the reason I think this is suitable for TreeHugger – a site not generally concerned with things like typefaces – is because it bucks the culture of convenience that is eating away at both the environment and ourselves.
For the sake of convenience we can’t live without single-use plastic and driving a car half a mile to the market. And meanwhile, the conveniences afforded by technology are robbing us of all kinds of thinking skills that used to keep us sharp. We no longer need to remember phone numbers or add figures in our heads, we don’t have to know how to spell words correctly or figure out routes on a map. I worry that we are going to become a species reliant on external brains, while our own become flaccid with disuse!
At a time in our history when every thing is pathologically designed to make things easier – to make us work less, move less, think less – how refreshing it is to stumble upon something designed to make things more difficult! Even if in the end the goal is to make memorization easier, that we have to use our brain power and work a little harder to get there can only be a good thing. And if we can get a bit of a memory boost out of the deal, all the better.
Not to be a contrarian, but we do seem to come up with new tasks to replace those that go by the wayside, so I have to wonder if Melissa is truly accurate in her worries. Do we have piles and piles of flabby20 year olds, feebly kicking bodies with which we can find nothing to do? (Soylent green! Oh, sorry.) Perhaps there was similar muttering from hard-core car drivers when automatic transmissions came around.
Figuring out the appropriate measurement metric may be a wee bit of a challenge.
