{"id":8528,"date":"2013-06-03T08:08:27","date_gmt":"2013-06-03T12:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=8528"},"modified":"2013-06-03T08:41:05","modified_gmt":"2013-06-03T12:41:05","slug":"give-me-a-sign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2013\/06\/03\/give-me-a-sign\/","title":{"rendered":"Give me a sign."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"stupid<\/a>The other day I was driving in Plattsburgh, in a hurry as always and a little flustered, and I came to a big, busy intersection.<\/p>\n

I visit Plattsburgh regularly and had a general sense for where I needed to be, but I needed a little guidance.<\/p>\n

Yet when I looked at the streets going every which direction, there were no signs.<\/p>\n

Literally not a single street name.\u00a0 No indication of where I was or which streets led where.<\/p>\n

I know, I know —\u00a0 it’s a sign of burgeoning middle age, but I notice this kind of breakdown more and more often.<\/p>\n

I spent a lot of time in a hospital recently in the Midwest caring for a sick relative.\u00a0 It was a huge, sprawling place.<\/p>\n

There were plenty of signs leading to the cafeteria, at least at first, but then inexplicably they just stopped.\u00a0 Two complicated turns away from the restaurant — nothing<\/em>.\u00a0 You were on your own.<\/p>\n

The lack of adequate way-markers may seem like a fussy, Andy Rooney-esque preoccupation, but in our hectic, fast-paced, heterogeneous world, clear, informative signage is crucial.<\/p>\n

Take Windows 8, the baffling new operating system that has taken over my computer.<\/p>\n

Again and again, the program dumps me into places where I don’t want to be, where there are no easily graspable clues about how to move forward or go back.<\/p>\n

How did I get here?\u00a0 How do I get out? How do I make it stop doing this awful thing it’s doing?<\/p>\n

Whoever designed this virtual world obviously understood the roadmap, the matrix of prompts and possible decisions and clues.\u00a0 But they didn’t leave anything like enough breadcrumbs for average users like myself.<\/p>\n

I suspect that the problem lies mostly with the technical people, the engineers and programmers and architects and planners who are responsible for designing our increasingly built environment.<\/p>\n

They are systems experts and, bless their hearts, they make the modern world possible.<\/p>\n

From the baffling left-side right-side parking system in New York City to the stop-don’t<\/em> stop signage at the US-Canada border, they’re trying to guide the mice through the maze of infrastructure needed to handle tens of millions of people.<\/p>\n

And they study the lines on the diagram until they seem like common sense.\u00a0 How could anyone be confused by this stuff?<\/p>\n

They understand, for example, that you’re not supposed<\/em> to stop at the major intersection leading into Saranac Lake from Lake Placid.\u00a0 So they don’t bother putting up a sign indicating as much.<\/p>\n

Why would you need a sign telling you not to stop?<\/p>\n

But to average drivers, it looks<\/em> like the kind of intersection where you should stop.\u00a0 Which means that about a hundred times a day people do just that.<\/p>\n

They come to a complete stop in the middle of the highway, meaning bottle-necked traffic and the risk of accidents.<\/p>\n

This being the complicated world that it is, there’s actually a science for all this, called semiotics.<\/p>\n

Which refers not only to actual signs — like the street sign on your corner — but to all the real and virtual signage that we use to communicate.<\/p>\n

In an increasingly global world, how do we signal to one-another across the transoms of cultural difference?<\/p>\n

How will a company tell me how to assemble my new lawn mower, in a way that will also make sense to a guy in Kuala Lumpur?<\/p>\n

How will more complex cultural products, from the nutritional content of Big Macs to the different offerings in your 401k plan, be labeled and identified, so that amateurs can sort them out and make informed decisions?<\/p>\n

My guess is that technical people will get better at this.\u00a0 For all its stumbles and missteps, the art of the user interface gets better and better.<\/p>\n

Apple has offered up a vision of a world where AI-type programs like Siri will offer us a huge assist with these challenges.<\/p>\n