Text and images have different ways of creating meaning and evoking ideas in our minds. Today, we often try to add more emotion and personality to our written messages using emojis. In this project, I wanted to take it a step further and explore how communication feels when it consists solely of images. This wasn’t about sending photos, but hand-drawn sketches.
The result was malmal – a messaging platform where messages are drawn rather than typed. This deliberately slows down the communication process whilst giving it a more personal and individual touch.
The interface, too, bears no resemblance to a traditional messaging app. Each chat is represented by a customisable horizontal bar. When you open a chat, the messages appear one after the other like cards that you can scroll through. To reply, you now have to get creative with your writing.
Of course, you can no longer just quickly send a message whilst having dinner. Updates like I’m sitting in the park eating an ice cream suddenly required time and attention. For me, that was precisely where the interesting question lay – does communication always have to be as quick and efficient as possible? Or can that extra effort actually make a message more meaningful?
With this project, I wanted to show that communication isn’t just about the information we convey, but also about the time, attention and personality we invest in it.
