You are welcome to participate in the Ibuproject! We just started. The submission date for drafts as a first step is November, 30.
background
Shuhan, Karel, Mandar, and Juli know each other as co-members of the international Symbol Group.
In one of Juli’s tuqtuli workshops, one of her students, Eric, visually translated the basic instructions for a painkiller, Ibubeta. Shortly after Juli sent Eric’s sketches to Karel, Mandar, and Shuhan who all work in the field of medicine and signs. Mandar immediately retranslated the visual messages back into language with one of his students. It turned out that they understood a remarkable 75 percent right. That was the spark that made us take the idea seriously.
Ibuprofen
Ibuprofen is being sold in many versions worldwide, like Ibubeta in Germany, but always has the same ingredients. It seems ideal for international, interdisciplinary cooperation.
how to participate
If you wish to take part please send a mail to Juli. She will give you the text that we would like to translate.
Together we carefully extracted the bare minimum of what absolutely needs to be known before taking the medicine. We used simple language. Possibly it may accompany the visual instructions.
Please translate the instructions into strings of signs. Use paper and a black feltpen or a simple drawing program. Let your sketches be black and white with no shades. Let the format be A4, landscape.
Instead of inventing translations for each and every word you are welcome to incorporate signs of the times that people are already familiar with from user interfaces, traffic signs, orientation systems et cetera.
Once you have completed your translation, please copy all your visual vocabulary – »headache«, »if«, and so on – and create separate files for them.
basic ideas instead of aesthetics
In this stadium of the project, aesthetics and style do not matter.
Please concentrate on the visual ideas. Your pictograms should be as simple as possible and as detailed as necessary. What does matter is that the visual vocabulary and pictogrammar convey the message successfully.
You will probably find that it makes sense to abandon the language logic of the text and to create your own visual logic instead.
Moreover, there are some hard nuts to crack. Like: how would your sign for »pharmacist« look like, or your translation of »reduce«? When you find certain words too hard to translate just write them inbetween your pictographic translation.
examples
Are you wondering whether and how others have already translated words and sentences pictographically? Juli will send you examples along with the text. And if you take a look around this website, it may become clearer what is meant by »stringing signs together«.
personal details
Please let us know the following: your mail address, your mother tongue(s), other languages that you speak, your vocational training(s), activities, and/or area of expertise, your sex, year of birth, place of birth, and place of residence.
file names
Please name your files like this:
visual_translation_firstname_lastname_country for your complete translation
muscular_pain_firstname_lastname_country, pharmacist_firstname_lastname_country, reduce_firstname_lastname_country, et cetera for all the visual vocabulary used in your translation (s. »how to participate«) and
personal_details_firstname_lastname_country.pdf for the personal details.
submission date
Please upload your drafts here until November, 30. Create a folder with your first and last name and include your files.
next steps
As soon as we have the translations of all the participants we will bundle up all the different visual vocabulary to make them comparable. We will analyze the different pictogrammatic approaches and group them by similarities. We will discuss the results and try to find patterns as the most promising path in visual translation seems to be when the same or similar ideas and approaches come from different people.
Once we have done that we will give access to the results to all the participants and invite them for an online meeting. Everyone who likes to will present their approaches. Together we will then discuss the first drafts and lessons learned. We will agree upon the next steps which will include an optimization phase of the results achieved so far and how to organize test rounds.
later steps
We will present the Ibuproject at the next Symbol Group conference in autumn 2026. Papers about the process, the results and insights will later be published in medicine and design journals. We look forward to interviews in podcasts, newspapers and magazines. Moreover, we fancy a book and with it to reach a broader, non professional audience.
After all, pictographic instructions are also conceivable in other contexts: for preparing meals, for house rules, on parking tickets and much more.
questions
If you have questions please don’t hesitate to mail to Karel, Mandar, or Juli.
