While researching interactive art projects I found an interactive alphabet synthesis machine. The project is described on this site: http://www.flong.com/projects/alphabet/ The site also highlights other interactive art projects. According to this site “The products of the Alphabet Synthesis Machine probe the liminal territories between familiarity and chaos, language and gesture. ” I thought that quote was an interesting illustration of the artistic side of any alphabet. In my opinion an alphabet would have to be clear and recognizable as well as simple but varied from letter to letter.That said the alphabets made by this machine varied drastically in complexity and in shape. Some alphabets have extremely simple letters like this: and others are very complex like this: A large archive that shows sample letters from many alphabets can be found here: http://www.alphabetsynthesis.com/~flongco/alphabet/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?page=0 I feel that some alphabets work better than others. The machine itselef and farther description of the project can be found at this site: http://www.alphabetsynthesis.com/ I played with it myself and the machine has an interesting way of creating the alphabets. First the user writes a sample glyph that has some properties indicative of their language. Then the user gets a sample alphabet and gets to set various parameters than can click to evolve their alphabet. How it will evolve is not always obvious. Here is an image of the full alphabet I created using the machine. I now have it as a typeset that I can use in most programs.I really like the idea behind this project because it is very imaginative and could be used by people as part of other projects and creative endeavors. I think it succeeded in showing that alphabets can vary greatly. It also succeeded at mimicking characteristics that are familiar to us from other languages without directly copying them. That said I think they did a bit less well with the evolution portion of the interactive. I felt the controls were fairly unclear and it could have been more strait forward. Overall I still think the results were very interesting. As someone who likes videogames and role play games world building is very interesting to me. Having a made up alphabet is a good step in adding life to a made up culture. That said a person would likely want to vary the number of letters in the alphabet or maybe change the way they are used within the culture, but this gives someone a creative basis to start with. If this project is going to be extended maybe they could ask the user for input on how his/her culture would format their writing. Would it be left-to-right, right-to-left, top-to-bottom, diagonally, in square bunches, spiraling inward, scattered like a code, etc. It could then generate a simple sample correspondence from a “citizen” of that made up species. Another extension that would be useful could be the addition of numbers and special characters. They could also have some sort of dictionary where the user could store words he/she came up with for his/her civilization, and then after he/she have added a lot the program could sometimes suggest possible words based on the structures of the ones you have entered already. In general I like the idea of creative tools that helps with the world building process and allows for the development of further creative projects using your results.