Word Garden
I've posted quite a bit about what led up to this project, over in the Reading and Writing section. It started as a way of looking at orthographic patterns in simple one-syllable words.
This is basically a matrix of rimes. Vowel sounds form rows, and closing consonants form columns. Families of consonants are grouped by color: here, bubble-gum pink for stop sounds, yellow for fricatives, and peach for the stop-fricatives between them. From left to right, the rows move from short, fleeting sounds to consonants that are increasingly more sonorous and vowellike.
The intention here is not to teach linguistics to children, but to create a framework that mirrors our intuitive knowledge of the spoken language. Alphabetical order doesn’t accomplish that. If we want to look at spelling patterns, it seems more useful to sort by sounds.
As an architect, I’m used to thinking of pattern in terms of visual cues such as alignment, proximity, size, and color. The Word Garden uses those cues to communicate a sense of the order underlying sounds and syllables in English: a complicated, weedy territory, when you look at it in writing, but an order that can be mapped nevertheless.