IKON

IKON is a graphical communication system designed to be an easy, intuitive, international and transcultural visual language developed by the KomunIKON project. It is based on icons and could be used in communication technology, graphic design, education, product merchandise and humanitarian crisis support.

Design guidelines and philosophy

International: Icons should be understandable across different countries and languages.
Inclusive: Icons should respect diversities, such as gender, sexual orientation, ethnic groups, skin colors, etc.
Human-centered: The concept of a "human" is represented in many icons, like I, you, father, mother, etc. In the future, we might add icons for animals, plants, extra-terrestrials, and more.
Precise: Each icon should have a well-defined meaning, as in a dictionary. Compare "hear" and "listen".
Complete: All important meanings should be able to be represented by at least 1 icon so that people could express themselves more efficiently.
Uncensored: There is no ban on vulgar, sexually explicit, violent, and offensive icons, as in any real language. Bans can be in the forums, not in the language itself. We don’t want to be like the Orwellian Newspeak.
Consistent: If an icon X has a certain meaning of Y in an icon Z, the icon X should maintain the same meaning of Y in every icon.
Transparent: Icons should be understood as easily as possible by most people.
Crowd-driven: Icons are tested by the community through a tool called iconometer, developed by the University of Geneva.

Sample sentences

Here are some of the sentences that have been developed by KomunIKON for their clients. Please keep in mind that the IKON language is very flexible, so the grammatical explanations offered here are meant to show some ideas behind the icons, but they are not rigid rules to be learnt, anyone can use the language as they prefer, as far as the receiver understands.

In the icon for "listen" a hand emphasizes the active behavior of the listener, while the icon for "hear" (a less active action) does not show the hand.

Sample sentence in IKON - I love to listen to music

"The whole life in one night"

This is the Italian title of a movie by Robert Bresson (1967). "Whole" is in opposition to "half, minority and majority". "Life" is in contrast to "death". "In" is in contrast to "out". "Night" is in contrast to "daylight".

Sample sentence in IKON - whole life in one night

The icons developed by KomunIKON can be used wherever you need to write a message to any type of recipient, even if they are people that have difficulties reading that message, such as children, illiterate or disabled people.

Links

Information about IKON
https://www.komunikon.com/en

Information supplied by Teddy Nee, a multilingual language blogger and IT engineer. You can find his language blog at: neeslanguageblog.com

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