Lipi is a Devanagari keyboard that reimagines the typing experience beyond QWERTY. It is a speculative keyboard that questions the assumed universality of widely used design tools by highlighting the nuances of Hindi, the third most spoken language in the world, that are often forced out of the keyboard due to standardization practices.

India is a country with over 700 languages, each with their own dialects and often with their own unique scripts. Google Font, one of the largest free font libraries in the world only represents 9 of these languages. These nine languages collectively have only 56 font options between them. Compare this to a staggering archive of over 1400 Latin fonts.

This disparity isn't because there aren't enough speakers. For example, my mother tongue, Hindi, with its many regional variations, is the third most spoken language in the world, with over 700 million speakers—twice the population of the US. However, the lack of representation can leave a language even as popular as Hindi marginalized.

Let alone designing a font, even typing in Hindi poses a challenge. A complicated language with an alphabet comprising 52 letters, a system of diacritics, and conjunct consonants, Hindi has been retrofitted into a qwerty keyboard that was designed for a language with half the number of letters.

This forces each key to perform multiple tasks, impeding the user's intelligence and speed and making them deprioritize designing in any language other than English.

Charmaine Sah, a visual designer based out of Kota, India, shared the sentiment, "Honestly, typing in Hindi is painful. It slows me down so much and takes hours to do something that could be done in 20 minutes for English"

Instead of optimizing design within the existing paradigms, what if we broke away from it?

Lipi is a Devanagari keyboard that reimagines the typing experience beyond QWERTY. It is a speculative keyboard that questions the assumed universality of widely used design tools by highlighting the nuances of the Hindi language that are often forced out of the keyboard due to standardization practices.

Lipi is designed to prioritize two key features of the language: the system of Matras and its rhythmic pattern. Matras are vowel sounds added to the consonants in the form of a diacritic. These Matras are constantly used in almost every word formation, as opposed to occasional accents in the French language. To make it easier to add matras, the keyboard has two round dials, which allow you to add a Matra, just like old-school telephones, while keeping the consonant pressed.

The language also has a rhythmic pattern to its arrangement of consonants, that can be broken into groups of mostly fives and sometimes fours. Each group begins with a sharp consonant and ends with a deeper one, traveling from the tip of your tongue to the back of your mouth. This is how the language was taught in schools, and this grouping is how the consonants show up on the keyboard. It allows greater recall value for the first-time users of the hardware and those who are reacquainting themselves with the language through hardware.