Who doesn’t know the legendary movie “Eddie the Eagle”?

The somewhat clumsy Brit Michael “Eddie” Edwards has dreamed of taking part in the Olympic Games since childhood, but fails in every single sport. When he learns that the discipline of ski jumping is hardly practiced in England, he tries to teach himself the sport. But then he met Bronson Peary, who took him under his wing and prepared him for the 1988 Olympic Games in Calgary – where he became a crowd favorite as “Eddie the Eagle”.

The story of Bionic Reading® inventor and founder, Renato Casutt, was almost the same – except for the small, subtle difference that his story has not (yet) been made into a movie ;).

The idea was born in 2009, during his studies to become a typographic designer at the “Zurich School of Design”. The students were allowed to create a book design for the Swiss bestselling author Pedro Lenz. The author of the book did not write his texts in German, but in a dialect of the Swiss language, which made it almost impossible for Renato to read the text. However, when the author said something in his dialect, Renato was able to pick up every single word and understand the context immediately. In other words, his brain had no problem at all absorbing the text through his ears – so the problem lay in absorbing the text through his eyes. 

Even though Renato had heard this dialect form several times before, but had never read it, so his brain had no vocabulary for this dialect form and was therefore unable to make a comparison. And that’s exactly what he had to change. Renato has realized that he actually only needs individual fragments of the words to tell his brain: “Hey, you don’t know exactly this word, but you know one that is very similar. So just use this similar word that has the same meaning and is already in your vocabulary.”

Renato then converted the text manually, word for word, into Bionic Reading®, translating it for his brain, so to speak, and was suddenly able to read and understand the entire text. His classmates felt the same and were even able to read faster with this variant. Renato was very busy at that time and was still working in his parents’ company, which is a business in the printing industry. It was mainly due to a lack of time that he stowed the idea of Bionic Reading® away in a drawer. Another reason for stowing the idea in a drawer was that the technical possibilities for gaining a foothold in the technical world as a “typo person” were not yet so mature at the time.

Conclusion of this story
Hold on to your ideas and visions. Even if they seem impossible at the moment. It often takes a lot of time and patience to realize them. But in the end, you can do it too.

At Bionic Reading®, we live this motto not only privately, but also professionally.

Since the foundation of Bionic Reading® we have been working with Apple devices. And not for nothing. We are very satisfied with them. And as you can see in the picture, one of our used Apple devices for creating our designs has been doing a great job for about eight years. And the iMac still works like on the first day, even with a big crack.

If you are interested, have a look at the interview on “Apfelfunk am Hörer” with Malte Kirchner (DE) and Jean-Claude Frick (CH), where among other things the crack in our iMac is discussed (“Link Interview Apfelfunk einfügen”). 

What we are very happy about is that Apple has mentioned Bionic Reading® several times in their Livehacks. It would be awesome if Apple would integrate Bionic Reading® into their app “Apple Books”. That would be one of the biggest dreams of Renato Casutt. Especially because he would be able to fulfill a big wish of his community, which asks him for this almost every day. 

Conclusion from this story
We love Apple and would love to welcome Tim Cook with Swiss chocolate in the Swiss Alps.