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Week 1 |
We are inviting reflections on this photo album, and on the question of safety measures in public space. If you would like to submit a response, email;
photoresponse@manifestoclub.com
These images demonstrate that in the UK -- despite the enthusiastic commissioning of and support for landmark architecture by national and local government, the endless discussions about urbanism, and the slew of television programmes about design -- the authorities care little about the aesthetics of our urban environment. And to the extent they do, they are blind to the micro elements that make up this macro experience.
The acme of this 'safety tape and signage' philistinism is the Gatso camera that is so ugly only its designer could love it. Yet these insults to our aesthetic sensibilities are scattered across the land.
If there really are risks we need to be warned about we should be clear that such warnings can be communicated in elegant and effective ways. Designers and architects know how to embed subtle clues in artifacts and spaces: think of door plates and handles indicating whether one should push or pull; the visual semantics of changes in paving pattern or texture; and signs that use shape and colour to add information. Of course, communication designers facilitate the elegant and effective use of shape and icons, and colour and typography. (Just think of Jock Kinnear's and Margaret Calvert's work on UK road signage system.) And architects and urban designers can create street 'furniture' that is a delight -- or at least invisible.
Design critic Stephen Bayley notes that the New York city planners commissioned architects Rogers Marvel to design security measures "employing elegance and wit rather than brute force and ignorance" to protect the city's Stock Exchange. (See From car bombs to carbuncles, Stephen Bayley, Observer, November 18, 2007) In the UK we get the unsightly 'temporary vehicle control barriers' with which our (cowardly) leaders chose to barricade the Palace of Westminster. For them, aesthetics and beauty in design is all instrumental: reaping the financial benefits of the 'creative industries', creating an image (Cool Britannia), or facilitating social inclusion. Not about excellence and pride, and care and attention to detail in creating pleasurable spaces for its citizens.
Nico Macdonald, design writer, London.
http://spy.typepad.com
Imagine a photo of this: a road accident where a car is wrapped around the cause; a street sign saying 'Thank you for driving slowly'.
This is an image which Ben Hamilton-Baillie, a British architect and advisor for the European 'Shared Space' initiative, uses in lectures to punctuate the following point: 'Signage is, contrary to popular belief, a very poor way to influence behaviour. It may work in a car-only space like a motorway, but it is the least subtle and effective form of communication in the public realm. When we are talking about complex communication between two people inter-human situations everyone knows that the more indirect communication is, the more effective the message. Women know that. Musicians, artists and architects know that.' Hamilton-Baillie suggests that we need to make the street more 'legible' - not through signage but as an elegant, live urban environment.
The precedent for 'Shared Space' is the experiment in traffic signage devised in Holland and now seen in London, Washington and other communities around the world. In Holland, traffic engineer Hans Monderman has overseen the removal of all traffic lights, signage, speed-limit signs, speed bumps, bicycle lanes and pedestrian crossings. In his view it is when 'drivers stop looking at signs and start looking at other people, that driving becomes safer.' He goes on to say that 'all those signs are saying to cars "this is your space, and we have organised your behaviour so that as long as you behave this way, nothing can happen to you". That is the wrong story.' The primacy of the 'traffic world' is interrupted by repositioning the relationship between cars, other motorists and pedestrians and making them aware of operating in a shared space. In the most radical scenarios, this space is literally shared as the kerb traditionally separating them has been removed. Drivers can no longer merely act on signage or a green light automatically, but have to act and react as part of a momentary micro-community of pedestrians and other drivers at each road junction.
Rather glibly it has been dubbed a Dutch 'naked road' experiment by the media, yet the 'Shared Space' initiative is currently being developed by at least five European countries. In Wiltshire, in the west of England, removing the white lines that separates drivers on one side of the road from the other has already reduced accidents by 35%. In Kensington High Street, west London, there has been a 69% reduction in accidents in three years through the removal of railings, pedestrian guard-rails and signs. This is what one could call a relational interpretation of information design. It is one which literally creates, and relies on, human relations - Hamilton-Baillie's elegant, live urban environment.
The authors are from
Limited Language
a web-platform for the generation of discussion and writing about visual communication.
'In the cities in which we live, all of us see hundreds of publicity images
every day of our lives..we are now so accustomed to being addressed by these
images that we scarcely notice their total impact'. In his 1972 essay, 'Ways
of Seeing', John Berger describes the proliferation of advertising, in terms
of 'a philosophical system', which interprets the world as 'a setting for
the fulfillment of (its) promise of the good life'. For Berger, the problem
with the visual language of advertising lay not merely in its propensity to
confuse consumer choice with political freedom, but in its corrupting
effect, being ever present and familiar, 'as we turn a page, as we turn a
corner'.
Thirty-five years on, a fascination with the new visual language of safety,
expressed through the proliferation of safety signage in public spaces,
provides the starting point for Tom Mower's photo essay, 'Attention Please'.
Where Berger challenged society's acquiescence to the 'total system of
publicity images', Mower addresses the numbing effect and increasingly
bizarre relationship of safety signage to contemporary life. For Berger, the
problem with advertising lay in the fantasy it promoted of a 'world that
smiles at us'. In contrast, Mower's photo essay suggests a vision of the
world as slapstick, a 'place that intends to trip you up if you are not
paying attention every step of the way'.
Whether making mountains out of molehills or stating the blindingly obvious-
Caution! Vehicles in the Road! - the situations in Mower's photographs
express a morbid preoccupation with detecting risk, alongside a clumsy,
'make do and mend' approach to problem solving. 'Was somebody out of their
mind?' asks Mower, struggling to distinguish a playful arrangement of
traffic cones on top of statues and telephone kiosks from their official
positioning, clustered around a tree stump in the park. Not so much
practical measures, addressing significant public safety problems, the
signs, cones, barriers, caution tape and other assorted items of 'safety
furniture' encountered in Mower's photographs, appear to serve no higher
purpose than to preach a constant message of caution. Where Berger's
advertising images spoke of a desired, if endlessly deferred future, Mower's
photographs express an endless present of muddling through. Only the
architectural drawing of London's Exhibition Road offers the slightest
glimmer of a possibly desirable future. Redesigned as a 'naked road',
stripped of its kerb and street signs, where cars, bikes and pedestrians
intermingle, the proposed redesign of Exhibition Road is one of ten pilot
projects in the Mayor of London's 100 Public Spaces programme, which aims to
improve the quality of public spaces in London.
Floor slippery when wet; water presents danger to small children; Caution!
Seats may become wet.... 'You have to wonder where you could go with this',
Mower writes, suggesting that as safety signage becomes more and more banal
and obvious we simply stop reading it. Mower's photo essay and the
accompanying photographs on the Manifesto Club website remind us that we
can't afford to switch off our eyes and ears to the degradation of public
space and the extent of its colonization by petty officialdom. 'To look is
an act of choice', wrote Berger. Change must follow.
Pauline Hadaway, director of Belfast Exposed photography gallery
The 'Attention Please' project exposes a deeply confused culture. On the one hand few adults enjoy being treated as infants. Constant exhortations to 'Mind the Gap' or 'Wash your Hands', along with the many examples contained in Tom Mower's photo-essay, clutter up our public and intellectual spaces. Eventually, like the ever-expanding warnings on cigarette packets, these messages are simply ignored or read as social policy statements, to the detriment of those who would issue serious warnings in the future. At the same time however, there is claimed to be a diminished tolerance towards adversity operating across society today, leading to a growing tendency to 'blame and claim', or at least a perception that people might do so emanating from those in authority.
This desire to be free of constraints whilst simultaneously introducing more of them is perhaps best expressed through the exasperated sounding statement of Bill Callaghan, Chair of the Health and Safety Commission, who, at the launch of his Executive's publication; 'Five Steps to Risk Assessment', in August 2006, urged people to 'get a life' and take 'sensible' risks. Some might suggest that this was a bit rich coming from a body many hold largely responsible for promoting the culture of risk-aversion that now afflicts the UK. Less than a month after his comments, Bristol City Council staff were notifying their tenants that mats were to be banned from doorways to preclude against future tripping and slipping injuries. The reason that the Health and Safety Executive, and others, including the former Prime Minister are unable to reverse a trend they recognise as problematic, is because they do not understand its origins in the first place. According to Rick Haythornthwaite, Chair of the Better Regulation Commission; 'We have all ... been complicit in a drive to purge risk from our lives'. But, whilst making positive noises about 'the importance of resilience, self-reliance, freedom, innovation and a spirit of adventure', his organisation essentially proposes that successive governments succumbed to emotional public pressure for safety, exacerbated through media hype. Accordingly, more information, more training, more risk assessment and communication, as well as targeting 'the most vulnerable', are to be promoted to deal with this presumed public illiteracy.
In fact, safety obsessions are an outcome of complex social processes that have encouraged a diminished sense of self and social solidarity. It would be naïve to believe that various governments, agencies and officials had been wholly innocent in this regard. Precaution, prevention and pre-emption were hardly foisted upon reluctant regimes from below. Rather they have been promoted by senior politicians and officials as tools for public management in an age devoid of broader political principles. When leadership and direction are replaced by such opportunist populism one of the outcomes is the cultural confusion that now surrounds us, with its concomitant visual clutter. While many officials recognise the downside of these over-caution, nevertheless, zombie-like, they continue to march in the direction of more safety initiatives, more signs, more awareness-raising and more warnings. It is almost as if we now live in a society in denial of its own reason and ambitions, as well as reluctant to speak out and say so. To be more precise, it is an anti-social society. This is why Tom Mower's contribution is so welcome and refreshing. It takes important steps in highlighting this problem, ridiculing it, and starting to build a community of those willing to do something about it.
Dr Bill Durodié is Senior Lecturer in Risk and Corporate Security, Cranfield University
The pictures depict the banal symbols of a risk-averse culture. In a world where safety has become an end in itself, society constantly promotes symbols and rituals to transmit the need for caution. Since we can never be too careful we need health warnings that remind us to beware. The photos provide striking illustrations of how risk management has turned into a performance. Warning signs cluttering the streets serve the role of a stage set where life as a risky drama can be negotiated. Probably we take the performance of risk management for granted so that we no longer notice the warnings that stand between us and the real experience. That is why this essay provides such a useful visual reminder of a world that turns daily routine into a trial for life.
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology, University of Kent
I was very shocked and upset when I was in the oldest house of Glasgow. It was all filled with warnings above entrances of small doors, warnings that the floor was not flat anymore, etc, etc. Everything yellow and red and reflecting. The main thing to get impression of life of people in the past totally disappeared. I would say that anyone knows or expects smaller sizes in these houses and is able to adapt him or herself to these situations and environments. It will be risky for society when people do not learn to adapt to changing circumstances anymore, and that government and insurance enterprises decide for people. Unfortunately I didn't make pictures; I prefer to collect pictures of beauty.
Spanish friends of mine visiting London are always bewildered by the number of public announcements that are made on British trains and the London Underground: 'Mind the gap!', 'Stand back behind the yellow line!', 'Let people off the train first!', 'Take all your personal belonging with you!' It is as if we are unable to negotiate travelling on public transport without being constantly instructed what to do and where to stand. With Gordon Brown's announcement this week of more security measures at our train stations and airports the frequency of these announcements is likely to increase further. My friends joke that British people don't know how to travel on the Underground without instruction; we'll fall off the platform or leave our shopping on the train. It always strikes you when you return to the UK from abroad how much we are hectored by these announcements. Interestingly, whilst travelling through Madrid's new airport terminal recently I noticed (by a sign at passport control ironically enough) that public announcements are not made in the terminal, the sign advises you of this in advance. People are responsible for checking they get to their departure gate in time without the need for endless announcements. It makes the place a much more relaxing and civilised environment to spend time in.
It strikes me that the proliferation of No Smoking signs is used for much the same purpose as warning/caution signs. In many, perhaps most, cases they are posted where people would not have been smoking anyway - or not in such numbers as to have been noticeable (in "hospital grounds", for instance, or in most shops). The signs are everywhere just to remind us who is boss, that we are under observation, and that we exist and walk about by permission of the parent State.
You only need to compare what the Swiss do to see what difference it makes. I was in Geneva two weeks ago and one of the main observations that struck me very forceably was a delightful absence of signs! Just to underline this, when I got home there were two new posts and four signs at the end of my little dead end road, plus various signs painted on the walkway. All that to alert cyclists that this is now a cycle path! Yet, of the four cyclists I saw yesterday on this stretch of the road, none was using the path nor have they noticed the signs.
My favourite worst/horrifying Attention Please sign was one from the Met in Soho back in February. Apparently they wanted info on 'two couples with dogs seen arguing in the street between 11pm-11.30pm'. There was also a 'kids seen cycling across Wittington park after an argument broke out'...Call Crime Stoppers?? For doing what? Having a heated discussion?? I like the inventive idea of this campaign, and will thus keep my eyes peeled for more ridiculous yet intrusive signs...