Strengthening the Conceptual Structure and Designing the Participatory Tasks
This week has been one of the most significant turning points in preparing the Studio Practice. With the initial version of the methodology drafted in Week 18, the focus of this week was to refine it into a clear, rigorous and fully justified framework. A key part of this refinement involved developing the workshop activities that will act as the primary method for gathering dialect based insights. This week was therefore split between theoretical clarification, practical planning and refining the structure so that it could directly influence the design phase.
The first step was revisiting Schön’s ideas on reflection in action and reflection on action. I realised that the workshop is not only a means of collecting data; it is also the mechanism through which participants and the designer actively co interpret dialect. Because of this, I rewrote the methodological rationale to show how Schön’s reflective cycles underpin every stage of the workshop. Reflection in action becomes essential when responding to participants’ interpretations of sound, tone and rhythm in real time, while reflection on action helps evaluate how these insights translate into typographic form during later experiments.
The most important development of the week was designing the workshop tasks themselves. Drawing from my research into expressive typographers, I shaped the workshop around sonic qualities rather than meaning alone. Designers like Aries Moross, Marion Deuchars, Bunbury Studios and SnoozeOne use movement, distortion and rhythm within type, which helped me understand that the workshop must explore how words behave, not simply what they denote.
Because of this, the workshop was structured around three core activities:
1. Loud vs Quiet Dialect Words
Participants identify whether certain Barnsley phrases feel loud, soft, sharp or drawn out. This reflects how dialect carries emotional and sonic markers, and allows me to capture the tonal qualities that typography must later represent.
2. Word Personality Mapping
Participants respond to prompts about how certain words feel when said aloud. Do they feel heavy, light, abrupt, friendly or aggressive? This draws directly on Hall’s theory that language is a cultural system of meaning making, allowing participants to express personal and communal interpretations.
3. Shape, Rhythm and Gesture Drawing
Participants draw basic shapes or gestures that represent the sound of dialect words. This is informed by Pataca and Costa’s work on phonetic typography and by expressive typographic practices where physical mark making is used to externalise voice.
Designing these tasks required balancing clarity with openness. They needed to be simple enough for participants to engage with easily, yet open enough to generate rich, varied visual material that could inform the experimental stage of my studio work. I revised instructions multiple times to ensure each task connected directly back to the research on dialect, sonic expression and typographic performance.
In refining the broader methodology, I also added detail describing how insights from the workshop would feed into the experimentation stage. Rather than treating the workshop as a separate event, I clarified how each output would be categorised, translated and tested typographically. This strengthened the methodology by showing a direct line between community input and visual outcomes, reinforcing the project’s commitment to authenticity and cultural specificity.
By the end of this week, the methodology had grown into a coherent system with a strong theoretical foundation and a practical, actionable workshop at its centre. The structure now clearly shows how the project moves from community engagement to experimental typography and finally to reflective evaluation. With the methodology completed and the workshop framework fully developed, the project is ready to move into the design phase.
LSJ DESIGNS 
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