For this brief we were tasked to get into groups of three to research and develop a signage intervention to be put up around DJCAD. We were then to discreetly monitor people reactions to the signs and see if our design would influence the way they behaved. The catch with the brief was that these signs had to be left up for only a couple of hours and then removed without leaving any trace.
In addition to DJCA my team and I went out into Dundee as part of our research. This was to see if we could make any observations about how people react to certain signage, and also to source any inspiration. Doing this really helped ground our thinking about the project and enabled us to get a general idea of how people behave around certain symbols and colours. The association between symbol and colour can completely alter the impact and meaning of a sign. This observation allowed us to make more effective decisions when It came to deciding on the nature of our signage intervention. Whilst we were out, we made several observations:
“People tend to pay attention to paper/ handwritten signs more than electronic.”
This is probably due to the unexpected and handwritten nature of these signs. We often assume signage will be well designed and printed, so the sight of a handwritten note can often grab the attention of passers-by. An example of this could be an ‘out of order sign’ on the likes of a lift/ vending machine.
“We found that most people would tend to ignore signage if traveling in a group.”
Those traveling with others are often enthralled in conversation and rarely pay attention to signage unless it’s something extremely eye-catching or unusual.
“Simple, and larger posters attracted more attention than others.”
“Simplified signage/ posters tended to draw more attention as they were easier to understand at a glance.”
After we had made our observations, we decided to focus our idea on the lifts around the college. This was due to the high volume of foot traffic the lifts receive, as well as a range of different idea possibilities stemming from the lift. We went through various ideas of what we could do to the lift to try and get a reaction from the public. One idea included marking off half the lift with warning tape and using a sign to say it was faulty. In hindsight, this may have led more to a sense of panic than anything else.
The idea we eventually settled on was to split the lifts into one for those who wished to chat and those who wanted to travel in silence. The idea was to have signage outside each of the lifts on every floor so that people could choose their preferred lift option. In concept, we believed this would be a great way of enabling those who wanted to chat interact with others and those who didn’t wish to converse didn’t have to.
For the design of our signs, we decided to go with a friendlier, unofficial look. We felt this reflected the fun nature of the experiment more than something more official-looking. We used a modern
Secondary Research
I wanted to looking into the signage guidelines a university might use to create a level of consistency throughout their campus. It’s clear to see Dundee Uni and DJCAD all follow a formula in terms of colour and style. This helps newcomers to the Uni with recognizing the signage so that they can find the information relevant to them. We tried using some of this research in our sign design, we wanted something similar to the university style, but different enough to stand out and attract attention.
Once we had our design settled we moved onto putting the concept into practice. It wasn’t until we began sticking the signs to the wall that we all realised an unbelievably obvious fault in our masterplan. People using the lift can’t choose which one they call. Even as I’m writing this, I can’t believe that none of our group realised this until the last minute, and I would vouch that we are all reasonably intelligent!
Once we finished banging our heads off the wall in frustration, we finished putting up the remainder of the signs and began our observations. We discovered as observers that we weren’t very discreet due to lack of hiding spaces in the lifts. This was yet another complication that completely passed us by.
Observations
In total we spent around an hour and a half to two hours observing our signs, each taking turns to travel up and down in the lifts. Over this period, we noticed that more often than not people were silent in the ‘silent lift’, which was our intention. However, in the ‘talking lift,’ the result was pretty much the same unless they were prompted by someone else in the lift to chat. There were some more unusual cases of people avoiding the ‘talking lift’ if they saw others already speaking in it and instead waiting for the ‘silent’ one. Also, some of the less patient people just took the stairs for the same reason. We did notice that people who were riding in groups were more likely to talk in the talking lift and remain quiet in the silent lift.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I wasn’t a great fan of this task although I did enjoy the concept behind it. I was very interested by the theory of symbol and colour association which played such a big part in the design and development of signage. I just wish we as a team had thought through all the pros and cons of our idea before becoming so set on it. If we had, we probably wouldn’t have to face the mind numbingly obvious catches to what was our ‘fool proof idea’.
