I was hoping to have this in better shape before posting today, but I’m getting impatient. I’m not apologizing or anything, I’m just saying if you try this out and something doesn’t work, there’s a good chance that I already know about and am currently working on it.

So what is the LettrWritr? The short story is, the LettrWritr is where my thesis research and general screwing around has gotten me so far. Will it be my thesis? I don’t know, but I’ve gotten some really good feedback on it already, so it just might be.

The long(er) story started a while back with a question: How do the communication tools that we use influence and shape the conversations that we have? It’s a classic question of form and content that lead me down the path of researching the qualitative differences between different communication technologies, from a social, psychological, interpersonal and UI perspective. I wanted to learn more about why we use the tools that we do to say what we say, and how one affects the other. In looking back on my recent projects and in conducting my weekly “experiments,” I’ve realized that what I”m really interested in doing, from a project standpoint, is highlighting those characteristics of communication devices that I find to be most interesting, and trying to play with them in some way.

This is how I eventually came to the LettrWritr. Knowing that there is some inherent quality in a handwritten letter that you don’t get in an email, both for the writer/sender and the reader/receiver, I wanted to see if the simplest of characteristics of the letter could be applied to content that was written in a different context, and see if the impact is still there. The purpose is to see what happens to a message that was written and submitted online, much like an email or web form, when it is translated into the form of a letter and delivered to its recipient that way. If you’re intrigued and not too scared, try it out and let me know what you think.

If you’re just looking for a tagline, LettrWritr is an email-to-letter converter. Snap.