Shifting Text Ownership: Author, Reader, Designer

How do authors, readers, and designers negotiate textual meaning and ownership through form, structure, and process?

This project explores how text is shaped by the changing roles of author, reader, and designer. Using AI-generated content across news, poetry, social media, and auto-novel, it looks at how meaning and ownership shift through layout and automation. Here, code is treated as a way of writing—not just a tool—allowing designers to step into the role of the author and take part in how language is made, structured, and interpreted.

Who Owns Words

This project explores the complex dynamics of linguistic ownership, arguing that while language is humanity’s shared heritage, its control is shaped by power structures, technological shifts, and legal frameworks that transcend time and space.

Power and Education

Language is structured as a tool for ideological control, seen in rigid educational protocols (e.g., China’s classrooms enforcing Core Socialist Values) and adult supervision over creative expression. Literacy acquisition becomes a process of assimilation into predefined systems.

Digital Transformation

The internet has disrupted traditional media’s monopoly over text, democratizing publishing through blogs and social media. However, users relinquish ownership through opaque user agreements, reducing words to ephemeral, algorithm-governed data. Cases like the forced sale of TikTok (2024) highlight geopolitical tensions surrounding digital text sovereignty.

AI and Legal Constraints

AI-generated text (e.g., ChatGPT) blurs human authorship, while censorship protocols (e.g., replacing banned words with symbols) reflect political and cultural biases. Legal systems and platform regulations enforce conditional and temporary ownership, revealing the fragility of textual autonomy.

Two words that speak to us of absence and recovery. Here, text and images resist the simplicity of this binary, looking towards the fleeting, the often overlooked and the transformative. We have found something growing in the cracks of the concrete, reassembled from the dust within an archive and in the light that the moon casts upon the sea. We have lost many things, but not in their entirety. Like an atmospheric sound that lingers over us, they remain living, waiting for our attention. An unknown quantity of reverberations surrounds us, conjuring memories, both material and affective, so as to offer a careful rereading of the present.

As this 12th issue of Unknown Quantities unfolds, a myriad of disciplines converge, asking you to dwell in the tension of impermanence. Reflecting on what we lose, what we find and what we hold, even if just for a moment.

This project is a theoretical exploration of text, examining the boundaries of language and its material presence in the digital age. It reflects on how repetition, scale, and accumulation transform language into visual matter. The work also considers the folder as a form of digital publishing—an interface that organizes, sequences, and shapes how meaning is stored and accessed.

The Clarity becomes noise—words multiply not to reveal, but to obscure, until meaning dissolves into pure texture.

Online chatting may seems convenient but it sometimes cannot express delicate tone of voice even with help from emojis.

Situates in between text and emoji, Alright Variable Type offers an alternative approach to how we could have an expressive online chat. Each font variable of this typeset represents a tone of voice and with possibilities to convey more subliminal messages. Users simply choose one variable which seems to suit their current tone of voice, there is no specific guideline on which tone is which font.

Montage of 2058

The boundary between the virtual and the real has gradually been blurred. We are living in an age when the importance of the virtual surpasses the importance of the real. What if it continues this way?

Montage of 2058 is a design (soft) sci-fi reveals what China in 2058 would look. In this future, the labor issue couldn't be solved and work still takes up most of a day leaving only few personal hours. Therefore a type business called Virtual Reality Bar emerged, in there, people could enjoy customized multi-sensorial holiday experience. In bookstores, books have been designed and bond exquisitely to exploit the only left-over value of the print medium — collection value. On the streets of those dodgy neighborhoods, what spark on the ground are those clinical business cards advertising an (possibly) illegal facial operation designated for online streamers and influencers.

What if one’s persona can be classified the same way data is? Persona Datum is a research project initiated under that question. One’s persona is composed of countless data, and the complexity of it is hardly understandable without borrowing labels as medium. In our social lives we commonly use label to classify a certain group of persona data via pattern recognition. That means when a certain behavior is repetitively conducted (or a particular statement is repetitively made) by a group of random people then a label is created and applied. Labels are the closest representations to persona data. However it is not the same case living in a world of mass media.

Mass media prefers simplification. The abundance of persona data thus becomes a burden during the process of network transmitting. As the same time, it is also defined as the process of mediating. Mediated label is overloaded with unnecessary attention to an extend the abundant persona data is ignored, discarded and buried. The research output is a game which imitates the process of how a label is being mediated. As mediating process is done, players can then enjoy their little triumph of clout.

This book design project is a disenchantment to the traditional idea of Feng Shui (Geomantic omen) which has been mistaken for superstition. In this project I have used research methods and modern design style to explain the logic and reasons behind Feng Shui and to make it more acceptable to the public nowadays.

Feng Shui is not a superstition, but a measuring tool. We could create a more pleasant and comfortable living environment by utilizing some theories from Feng Shui. Ba Gua is the infrastructure of Feng Shui, and it is an important tool used by our ancestors to understand the world around them. If Ba Gua was a computer with underlying logic, Feng Shui was a software installed within it.