Sign Life

So here is something that I have been playing around with for a while and would like some help with.

You may or may not have noticed that we are surrounded by signs. Signs to tell us what to do in particular situations, to direct us in emergencies, to point out facilities, to encourage us to be responsible citizens. Our workplaces are full of signs relating to health and safety, or showing us how to work the machines that we rely on. The same is true of our homes, instruction leaflets and warnings accompany many of the consumer items that we use to make our lives modern.

Once you start noticing these signs you realise how saturated our home and working environments are with them, they are literally everywhere. Some of the signs conform to international codes of practice, many are produced by corporations, municipalities or government departments and so are specific to particular regions. In this way signs reflect globalised norms, but also differences across places and cultures. In everyday use they can also be subject to change, being partially erased, or subverted by graffiti.

These signs most often come in the form of pictograms, simple pictures of people or everyday objects designed to convey meaning directly. In most cases these are accompanied by explanatory text, but this is not really necessary. The point is that the pictogram alone carries a complete message which is easily understandable, when seen in context.

I have always looked at these signs with interest. They reflect our everyday lives and our relationships with government and corporations, but, it seems to me, they can also make up fragments, or frames, of stories. These don’t have to be just signs, they can also be seen as moments in ‘sign lives’.

I think that the best way to get a feel for this is to take signs out of context, and this can be done easily by taking a picture of the sign and then cropping the image so that any text is removed only the pictogram remains. The images remain the same, but the without the context they can be read as we like, new narratives and ideas can be attached to them, they can be linked to other signs to make stories.

Of course the web is full of collections of pictograms and animations that use a pictogram style, but what is interesting to me is not what designers can do with the pictogram form, but how pictograms appear in everyday use, on the street and in our homes

So while we can take the signs out of context to allow us to think about them in different ways, it’s also interesting to know where they came from. This is now easy to do on a smartphone or recent camera by geotagging the images. In this way we can also build up a geographic understanding of the use and prevalence of signs and the different practices that they describe.

I have set up a flickr site called Sign Life (www.flickr.com/photos/99860778@N06/) where you can see the collection so far, and have also set up an email account signlives@gmail.com to which you can send images as attachments.

Now so many of us have got smartphones that can do this kind of task easily it seems like a good opportunity to crowd source these images.

Looking forward to hearing from you

Lots of love

Martin