Tuqtuli facilitates to communicate with each other without speaking the same language. Tuqtuli addresses pressing global issues and challenges. Our lives today could benefit from it in many ways.
Worldwide tuqtuli can help lifting language barriers and bridging trenches. It brings about dialogue, mutual respect and a safe space to learn and share with each other. It does so with such casualness that articipants forget that something more profound is happening behind the fun. That they open up to other people’s ways of seeing things.
A sense of connection is an essential part of being human. Tuqtuli is about discovering commonalities. It is new territory for everyone involved. Experience helps, but every new encounter brings something new to the table. That provides an experience of connectedness. This can help people conjure a sense of community.
Signs may appear to be a small denominator, but they prove to be a simple and pluripotent means for a lively comparison of each other’s nation, culture, language, environment and attitude. Signs enable encounters on a level that is equally new for everyone. Participants experience each other in an unprecedented manner through this innovative way of communication, as it requires both parties to step out of their comfort zone.
Tuqtuli is highly inclusive. This project is social design at its best because everyone is invited to participate. It affects the way we interact with each other.
Signs need to be created and contributed by as many as different people as possible as visual vocabulary for a global way of communication. Moreover, they represent intangible cultural heritage. In the course of this, tuqtuli aims to make those visible that are notoriously ignored in society: the poor, the precarious, the young, the old, migrants and people with disabilities of all kinds. For those it helps foster a greater sense of belonging in their cities and communities. Tuqtuli shines a light on non-Western, poor, small countries and lesser-spoken languages. Both in workshops and in the progress of the project tuqtuli brings together (signs of) people from different worlds.
Tuqtuli makes democracy a tangible experience by encouraging articipants to exchange their perspectives and insights while being equal co-creators and testers of visual vocabulary and a pictogrammar.
Refugees and migrants as well as those who work with them – doctors, teachers, employees of humanitarian organizations – will find tuqtuli a valuable tool when discussing needs and possibilities.
People who cannot read (well) could profit from messages in tuqtuli to take medication independently, prepare meals on their own, understand the basic contents of official mail, and much more.
There are already pictographic languages, some of them in use for people with language disabilities and for language learning. Unlike these, for tuqtuli dialogues, no one needs to learn vocabulary and grammar and no one is restricted to using only the symbols provided. Everyone is free to come up with their own signs and with their own logic behind stringing them up.
We don’t usually think about it, but sometimes communication is difficult. For example, when there is no common understanding of terms or even a common language. Then we experience successful communication as highly satisfying. I know what you mean, you know what I mean. Great!
As a new visual global language, tuqtuli could enable international understanding on an unprecedented scale. Ultimately it could contribute to more peace on this planet.