Honesty as antidote to feeling like a fraud working on Clockwise Loops. Rescope and rename.

I'm still up for the challenge I've committed to. I just realised, after a week of digging, how much of a rabbit hole the path is. I need to define my focus perimeters otherwise I'd fall victim to the classic "scope hell" trap. Let me first share what makes this project more difficult than I thought

Vast contextual space of how someone handwrites

Let's say we already focused on designing Latin letterforms and ductus to best accommodate quick noting rather than perfectly legible forms for someone with Western schooling background, the best script for that still depends a lot on who you are and the writing context. To name them exhausively, the proportion of one's left hand and its fingers, gripping, training background and strength of each relevant muscles, time budget to retrain, age, the size of alphabets you're writing and the stationary instruments you're using.

Two major issues surfaced from this

• There's only a handful of relevant research with handedness variable included in their study design and none of them solidly factored in other conditions beyond age and culture. My personal experience serves as N=1. I have limited resources and budget to increase that N substantially. Deriving any conclusions from this, while will still being very useful, could give an empty-middle representation.
• As already mentioned in The first blog on Clockwise Loops that a one-size-fits-all script/font is unachievable and so not my goal but it's now even more unclear how the end work should look like. I want to make something scalable and personalisable (what's the point of the age of AI that make everything, except life as a whole, easier if you cannot afford more of personalisation) and hopefully monetisable. However, being too ambitious could backfire for someone burnout-prone like me. TBFigured

Some of the seemingly apparent core principles turned out to be myths

I thought I was already really close to knowing enough to improve the initial design I have with confidence. I thought clockwise motion was definitely a good idea but my research suggested that it might not be the case. Now I question the other principles of leftslanting-first, downstroke-first, pull-first. Not that they are not true for me and a number of people anymore but I want their boundary conditions if possible.

It feels like I am a con

Being aware of those knowledge gaps of mine, and worse, of the global knowledge base filled with inferences, makes it a requirement to be very honest of what we/I don't know and not skilled at to be able to talk about my work comfortably in loud volume. A few things I have to admit here to proceed well if not already before

• I have no formal/educational background in art/design, biomechanics, calligraphy/penmanship, learning psychology, academic literature, rarely spent time with kids or any other left-handers. I only mostly read and thought about it for personal left-handing.
• I actually don't handwrite a lot and my handwriting kinda sucks. It's of a struggle-based passion rather than mastery. It's much better after I iterated through versions of my personal script and I hand journaled more recently with better comfort/speed/readability but still it's not something I can confidently use to gain credit of my making here.

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The rant has ended. I guess we just better off go back to typing. Here's my path forward to keep the LeftScripts project manageable.

Rename the project from Clockwise Loops to LeftScripts

Let's move the name up one abstraction layer detaching the name from any assumptions. Intentionally plural as that likely is what I'd eventually produce.

Scope hell is unwelcome here

Let's lock-down as many parameters as we reasonably can. This will limit the number of hours I need for the research and product design

1. On the script
   1. Latin ASCII character set
   2. Print style only, not cursive, not continuous line
   3. To be written with minimal paper rotation. Not for Palmer method
   4. Not intend to address smudging issue but might unintentionally improve it
2. On the writer
   1. Assume it is for people of age 12 plus (adults included) with Western schooling background (encouraged ccw motion)
   2. Assume non-hook grips. Could be tripod grip or squeeze grip
   3. Assume some willingness to practice
3. On the instruments
   1. Assume standard ball-point or gel pen
4. I might add more. Here are candidates
   1. prioritizing quick note VS legibility
   2. maybe also not underwriter grip on top of no hook grip. ie side-writing only

I'll work out on product scoping and share more later. This blog is already way too bloated than how I wanted.

Potentially conducting my own research

If more confidence in the design principles and further scope narrowing is needed. Relying purely on existing academic study is not enough. I could conduct my own research from publicly available structured data (eg QuickDraw), observations from public footage on social platforms, recently learned the available option of prolific.com

The top thesis candidate is a follow-up of this study where I want to know whether there's a pattern separating left-handed cw (39%) and ccw loopers Variability of Stroke Direction between Left-and Right-handed Writers

I should handwrite more

Obvious reasons I'm too lazy to articulate now

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