Circular Reasons

This is a recording of a lecture by Bas Jacobs held online and in-person at St Bride Foundation on Thursday 23 April 2026.

In today’s world of Unicode standards and QWERTY keyboards, the uniform approach to text can create the impression that writing is fixed: that letters are static, that typography is a fully developed discipline, and that the work of type designers will remain fundamentally unchanged in the decades to come. This associative lecture on writing, language and letters invites to question the dominant, rational, constructed narrative. If history, too, is a constructed narrative, then perhaps it need not only be written, but can also be assembled.

What follows is not a straight line. Through a series of uninhibited thought experiments, this lecture explores whether not just the history of writing, but maybe also its future, can be ambivalent when multiplied. While doing so, it proposes design as a form of historiography, and asks how alternative perspectives can shape our understanding of letterforms, of language and of typographic practices. After all, if a circle is round because it is a circle, where does it actually begin?

The European design collective Underware focuses on designing letters from a formalistic and formative perspective. Their practice manifests itself in design, performance, publication, education and installations. In this lecture, they attempt to offer a different perspective on their own work by placing it in a different context each time.