TSTO

With Vuoden Huiput (The Best of the Year in Finnish advertising and design) we wanted to experiment with the unpredictable nature of crowdsourcing and automated workflow. Together with a programmer, Juhani Pelli, we created an application that transformed any written word or sentence into a rebus, an allusional device that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. In English, a rebus often uses homonyms, as seen in the classic IBM logo comprising a picture of an eye, a picture of a bee and the letter M. However, homonyms are rare in the Finnish language, therefore the rebus is constructed from a list of some 5000 words with the most used syllables and matched with an image search result from Google. This "Rebus-machine" was published as a web service, through which any message could be encrypted and sent by email or shared on social media.