WYHIWYG what you hear is what you get. This seems to be the last link of a long chain of acronyms coined during the years and related to the evolution of the man-machine interaction. From the original ‘What you see is what you get’ many other acronyms hassprung, like WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) used for Lynx, a textual browser or WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See) related to general models of the establishment of user interfaces in synchronous groupware. The lowest common denominator of all these meanings is the constant relationship to the visual ability. With WYHIWYG on the other hand there’s a double revolution: both sensorial and semantic. As a matter of fact entering a web address, WYHIWYG will generate in a few seconds an mp3 track with a synthetic reading of the code with the proper metrics. So the website will become ‘readable’, explicit and it’ll make listenable what usually is not heard nor seen: the code. The re-appropriation of this sensorial faculties, often wasted by the visual supremacy, inevitably causes the overtaking of the perspective based on the point of view constriction in favor of a multisensorial representation. This is clearly perceivable when the concepts of horizontality and frontality are really scaled down. This generates, as Bruno Munari said a “design for all the senses”.

Francesca Tomassini