Lingua

UX/UI Design

Speculative Design

Exhibited at Believe It or Not, DotDotDot, Milan (2025).

Exhibited at Stories Make Worlds, Festival della Meraviglia, Laveno Mombello (2026).

Overview

Lingua is a critical, speculative design project exploring how restricting language constrains thought and cultural identity. It materializes an authoritarian scenario where total control is disguised as peace, brought to life through a working learning console, a pictogram system, and physical propaganda artifacts.

My contribution

Speculative narrative & system mechanics

Visual identity & pictogram design system

Editorial design & publication artifacts

Project’s scope

Speculative worldbuilding & narrative videos, linguistic system, functional console, regime design system, editorial propaganda artifacts.

Timeframe

3 months, October 2024 - January 2025

Speculative Narrative

The project explores language as a tool of thought and resistance, speculating on a regime that imposes a simplified tongue to erase cultural identity and restrict cognitive freedom through tangible artifacts.

Institutional Identity

The regime's identity draws on authoritarian rhetoric. It employs a calm, sterile aesthetic and a strictly greyscale palette, masking pervasive control beneath an illusion of institutional order.

Linguistic Genesis

Grounded in cymatics, the language translates acoustic frequencies into geometric glyphs, fixing sound into a vocabulary of 55 concepts. From these geometries emerges a minimalist syntax, abandoning the spoken voice in favor of a silent gestural code.

Learning Device

Positioned inside the home, the console weaves ideological control into daily ritual. The system strips oppositional concepts from the lexicon, neutralizing dissent into enforced optimism. By controlling the boundaries of language, it dictates what can be thought: what cannot be spoken ceases to exist.