Tagtype

Engineers and designers have been working for decades on efficient alternatives to the traditional QWERTY keyboard. Tagtype is a ten-button device for Japanese characters that was initially developed for a disabled novelist, Ransei Eto, and is today offered as a DIY kit. "Japanese phonetic alphabets consist of 49 syllables which can be organized into [a] 10 × 5 matrix of consonants and vowels. The 5 + 5 main input buttons of Tagtype correspond to the 10 consonants and 5 vowels, making typing Japanese much more intuitive than with the standard QWERTY keyboard."

Credit: Gift of the designers