BioMorphic Typography is Gromala's term for a family of fonts that respond, in real-time, to a user's changing physical states, as measured by Thought Technologies' ProComp+ biofeedback device. Rather than one typeface, it is a postmodern pastiche of many different fonts that are continually morphing. So, for example, the font "throbs" as the user's/writer's heart beats, expands as the user breathes, and "spikes" according to galvanic skin response. In this way, users become aware of their autonomic states -- physiological states that usually remain under our conscious awareness. The goal is to develop new approaches to experiential design that focus on the senses and the phenomenological history of writing and the body.

In one of his earlier work, the Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty critiques intellectualist and empiricist ideas of language. According to Merleau-Ponty, "the word has a meaning" (Merleau-Ponty 1989, PP. 177). For a behaviorist, at least one working during Merleau-Ponty's lifetime, language constituted a response to a stimulus; it may have a cause, but not meanings. According to Merleau-Ponty, the behaviorist understands speaking in terms of the way a lightbulb becomes bright, but the behaviorist doesn't offer an understanding of why this is so. Merleau-Ponty similarly criticizes the conception of language according to intellectualist understandings. Here, language is a kind of envelope of thought, an addition to thought that enables one's inner ideas to become communicable to others. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty understands language as that which does not transmit ideas or thought, but "accomplishes," (or completes,) it.

Merleau-Ponty claimed that thought and word are intertwined, but not simply as onomatopoeia. Speech, according to Merleau-Ponty, "is not the clothing of thought, rather it is its body." (Merleau-Ponty 1989, PP. 180) In addition,  Merleau-Ponty developed a gestural theory of language. Accordingly, when I speak, "I reach back for the word, as my hand reaches toward a part of my body which is being pricked; the word has a certain location in my linguistic world and is a part of my equipment" (ibid.). Or, to put it another way, speaking is making a certain kind of gesture in one's linguistic world. A problem one may raise is this: clearly, I can gesture to an object, say, a flower in the visual world. This world is shared intersubjectively. However, there is not only one given linguistic world. Merleau-Ponty overcomes this potential problem by arguing that there is a shared linguistic world, one that is the product of a sedimentation; it is the sedimentation of an intersubjective practice, and that differing linguistic worlds exist, profoundly influenced by culture. 

When one speaks, one is already using constituted meanings. Where do these meanings come according to Merleau-Ponty? He distinguishes  a spoken language from a speaking language. The spoken language, according to Merleau-Ponty, is the sedimentated world of acquired linguistic meanings that one has access to. The speaking language, on the other hand, is comprised of expressive gestures that engender language. To reiterate, Merleau-Ponty did not propose an onomatopoeic conception of language. The "original" speech does not sound like what it signifying, but expresses an "emotional essence" of our encounters with the world. We may sing when we are happy, we speak (or sing) the world in a kind of melody of words. Although Merleau-Ponty worked with Ferdinand Saussure and agreed with Saussure's ideas about the prominence of language with relation to our being, he did not accept Saussure's position that the relationship between the word and what it signifies is arbitrary. Rather, he understood this relationship to be "motivated" by mind, body, and world.

BioMorphic Typography was created in order to explore the gestural and "emotional essences" of language and the world that language inhabits. In some sense, users were active in Merleau-Ponty's speaking language, though his spoken language of course is the underpinning. It was informally tested on 4 undergraduate design classes, and 3 classes in the Humanities on the history of writing and technologies of writing. Popular or "hip" design fads and conventions were avoided, as those seem to strongly affect how designers used the system. The system was also tested with a poet in a small performance. This was the only instance that employed voice that influenced the morphing letterforms. It was also exhibited at several art galleries in the U.S., England, Japan and Sweden. With permission, the faces and hands of some users were videotaped, and their voices were also recorded as they typed. The biofeedback device that enables real-time feedback for several physiological states was clearly understood by users to be but rough indicators of physiological change. I ensured that users understood that one cannot measure emotions by any empirical means, but that changes in galvanic skin response, heart rate, and breathing were somewhat useful indicators when combined with Paul Eckman's software (which examines minute changes in facial expression and gesture), and especially with their own subjective accounts. Although most users were unaware that the biofeedback device bears a history with lie-detector machinery, most users exhibited a very strong preference for privacy.

The results were surprising. Most users had difficulty when presented with a blank screen and asked to simply write (or type, to be precise). Students responded in ways similar to gallery-goers, with some exception. A quarter of the students refused to leave when their time was up, and were allowed to stay as long as they wanted. Eleven of these undergraduate students spent 45 minutes. Nine of them were most fascinated by how they learned to control their physiological responses, especially, surprisingly, their heart rate. In terms of ease, respiration of course is the easy mode: one simply stops breathing, pants, or otherwise controls their breathe. Galvanic skin response is also relatively easy to learn to control, though it is not as simple as respiration. Heart rate, the most difficult mode to control, was the one that these nine students were most intrigued with. They described "getting caught" in "weird feedback loops," and were most enamored with the apparent mystery of how they learned, in such a short time, without instruction, to control this vital organ. Those users who were writers or poets of course exhibited no problem but complained about the distraction of an ever-changing font, no matter how small the change. Users who defined themselves as gamers approached writing in a game-like way, and often tried to "game" the system. That is, they were the users most likely to explore how the software and hardware worked, to poke around at its limits, and to see if they could "break it." Users in gallery contexts were the most reticent to write, whether or not their text was projected or more privately onscreen. Besides the nine students, the performance with the poet appeared to be the most interesting and successful, in terms of interest among the audience. Clearly, this application was the most structured and appropriate for the system.

Future work will be primarily driven by rewriting the software in order to be as flexible as possible and in order to maintain typographic integrity. As stated in the thesis, while a few other applications exist whereby fonts respond to input, they seriously lack aesthetic coherence typographically. Future plans are also focused on explorations of cultural differences among different languages (Turkish, Korean, and French) in differing contexts. For example, exhibits in Montreal, Tunis and Paris are in the planning stage. Work with poets and performances is continuing, as is the development of contexts that the system might best be suited for, especially in ambient computing. For example, work that was initiated several years ago with Thad Starner and Georgia Tech's Aware Home will be completed in the next year. In this application, the son of an elderly couple who resides in the home will use my system. The user's mother wears a device invented by Starner that keeps track of her movement, when she chooses to wear it. When the device picks up a fall or lack of movement for an extended time (determined by the mother beforehand), the font on the son's computer monitor will become more and more active as the situation demands. Thus, it will act as a sort of alarm that remains in the background and progressively becomes attended to as the font changes in more obvious terms. 

For Merleau-Ponty language is, simply put, an acquired system of meaning, one that no culture could exist without. Differing languages do not simply or arbitrarily sound different, but are "motivated" to be so because they are profoundly influenced by that language's culture, or mind/body set. To speak a language is to be in an ontologically specific mind/body world. The applications described above explore what Merleau-Ponty describes as "motivations."