What can we learn from the disputes between designers and scientists? the fruits of collaboration

Debates over the value of legibility research resurface with tedious regularity within the typographic community, with similar arguments rehearsed each time, and no reconciliation of divergent views. The critique often focuses on scientific researchers testing the wrong material, and using test material that is poorly designed, resulting in data that designers regard as unhelpful at best and in the extreme, useless. Furthermore, the test methods are often derided for being too far removed from any normal reading situation.
What we should learn from these fruitless discussions is that it is time to devise new ways of researching unresolved issues. Our studies take a different approach to how we can improve the reading experience. We move away from comparing the legibility of different typefaces to identifying how we process typefaces when reading. We also adopt an interdisciplinary stance which combines different types of expertise, rather than pitting one way of working against another. We draw on a method used in reading research and adapt this to explore how the extent and nature of differences between typefaces may influence word recognition.
Our experiments investigate 'font tuning', which describes the way in which readers identify letters by translating them from the particular shape of the letter in that font to an abstract identity that represents any version of that letter, i.e. is independent of font. Font tuning is demonstrated when it is harder to identify letters or words that switch between fonts as opposed to being all in one font. We use the method of rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) to present words because people can read words incredibly quickly when they are presented in the same location and therefore do not require eye movements. Our aim is to find out which stylistic features of fonts (weight, width and slant) require readers to make the greatest adjustment. For example, when we change from reading a word in a regular weight to bold weight does this require the same degree of adjustment as when we change from regular to expanded? The fonts we test are all developed specifically for these experiments so that it is possible for us to change only one stylistic feature at a time.
For the practising designer, the findings of experiments like these can be applied to layouts as they can help us better predict the effect that a change of typeface can have on the reader. For the scientist or more theoretically-oriented designer, an understanding of the perceptual significance of different manipulations may tell us more about the distinctive features used to identify letters.