Give me a Sign

I found this piece tucked away in one of my old note books. I made it while on a trip to Uganda in 199X. During the trip I was fortunate to stay at the Graphic Design in the Kampala International University. There was a very surprise invitation to talk about what I was studying. So a very hasty piece was put together, hand written on paper! It comes across very naive, and I cannot honestly remember if I read it word for word, but here it is.
As a visitor in a foreign city one is acutely aware of any deficiencies in informational systems. One is confronted with confusion and disorder, and the immediate response is to try and regain some sense of order, to map what is seen into some kind of structured knowledge space.

To take Kampala for instance we can identify many areas that would benefit from some attention, from a visual designer.

Starting with the obvious areas, taxi parks are unmarked and have no indications of route direction. Buses have no accessible timetables leaving the traveller to hunt around for times and services. It wastes time and is frustrating.

The task of locating a location involves more conscious effort than choosing a location in the first place.

The role of these public services should be to make it easier for people to get where they want to go efficiently and safety.

Public information spaces are filled with advertising that mocks the disorder that surrounds their highly controlled and specific messages.

As an institution of excellence I believe the department of graphic design should be taking the lead in helping solve these problems. It is suitably distanced from the day to day problems to assess and solve the problems creatively and professionally, it has freedom that is not given to commercial designers.

Students should be encouraged to identify problems and offer solutions, making commercial contacts and publicising the profession. The city contains many spaces into which the visual designer can project his image, bill boards, cars, buses, signs, all surfaces that can be enhanced and used in a beneficial way.

Industry and society in general conveniently supplies badly designed services and products. They have the habit of accumulating problems that can be effectively solved in a visual way. There is no need for the profession to be a service industry, there is enough demand for clarity to justify taking a lead and demonstrating to the industries the approach they should be taking. In this way the profile of the profession can be raised to a level to be involved in decisions that can really have influence and results to be experienced.

Informational Illustration demands much more than proficiency in a style or a technique. It demands looking at the problem from the viewers viewpoint. The message it communicates is usually specific and quite blunt.

This does not deny its own beauty or artistry, only that the means of assessment must be within the relationship of description, what is being described and the viewer.

The form of description cannot be isolated from the characteristics of the object of study, or the perceptual capability of the viewer to process the information.

The products the designer creates communicate directly with the reader. His reason for wanting to look at the product is not initialised by the illustration, but by the challenge of the task to be completed.

The difficulty of the task provides the stimulation needed to consult an authoritative description.