Urban Alphabets

Have you noticed all the letters around you? Would you like to create messages with a typography from your home town or a city you are visiting?

Urban Alphabets is an application that lets people use their smartphones to capture letters in their environments and reuse the typographical elements to write their own messages. The project is realized by the Helsinki-based artist and designer Suse Miessner.

The messages written using the Urban Alphabets App can be sent to friends using social networks. This project raises interest in the everyday surroundings and encourages playful social communications.

During the Media Facades festival 2014 the audience was able to collect their own alphabets or use alphabets found at the Urban Alphabets website and sent their own message 'postcards' using their own smartphones or on-site tablets on the Media Facades screen at the Lasipalatsi Square.

A series of workshops to co-create alphabets was organized at schools and in the mode of urban walking tours.

The Urban Alphabets installation was shown at Lasipalatsi Gallery and  on the LED screen at Lasipalatsi Square 21.8.-24.8.2014. 

In the Connecting Cities programme, Urban Alphabets was presented in 7 cities, where users created their city’s Urban Alphabets collectively and broadcasted messages created with the alphabet via urban screens of the hosting cities – Aarhus, Berlin, Helsinki, Liverpool, Madrid, Riga and Sao Paulo.