drucker.ca

At one of my favourite sites, Infos­thet­ics (see my blogroll), they note that the UN has come up with a new Warn­ing Sign for Radi­a­tion. Here it is:

Accord­ing to the report, this sym­bol is…

the result of a 5-year project con­ducted in 11 coun­tries around the world. the new sym­bol, devel­oped by human fac­tor experts, graphic artists, & radi­a­tion pro­tec­tion experts, was tested on a total of 1,650 indi­vid­u­als in Brazil, Mex­ico, Morocco, Kenya, Saudi Ara­bia, China, India, Thai­land, Poland, Ukraine & the United States to ensure that its mes­sage of “dan­ger — stay away” was crys­tal clear & under­stood by all.

It’s inter­est­ing to note that this sym­bol fol­lows a bunch of the ‘rules’ of UI design regard­ing warnings:

1. It’s red. Red is the colour of blood and is often asso­ci­ated with dan­ger. This is the rea­son that I am always upset by web sites (like Webnames.ca) who decided that their link colour should be red to match their colour scheme. Red should almost never be the colour for your links, peo­ple! I’d even go so far as to say that red should be reserved in most UIs for only warn­ings or errors.
2. It uses a tri­an­gle shape, which is fre­quently used in warn­ing signs because of the sharp­ness of the angles, con­not­ing dan­ger or at the very least, unpleas­ant­ness (if you got poked with it)
3. Unlike the old Radi­a­tion sym­bol (which is the three-sided sym­bol at the apex of the 3 fig­ures within the sign), it has a verb in it! The arrow with the per­son run­ning, which looks very much like an imper­a­tive ‘Go!’
4. It has some scary look­ing lines that show the radi­a­tion. Although this is not a rule per se, it does illus­trate some activ­ity, which is a good exam­ple of how an invis­i­ble force like radi­a­tion can be portrayed.
5. It shows the Death sym­bol, (skull and cross­bones), though this could be mis­read as ‘Radi­a­tion can cause Pirates and make you lose your left foot’ if you wanted to be thickheaded/silly about it. (For a whole series of mis­read­ings of IKEA warn­ings for comic effect, my friend Matt made up a whole slew of hys­ter­i­cal exam­ples ).

I’m glad that they tested the sym­bol in coun­tries like Brazil, Mex­ico, Morocco, Kenya, and Saudi Ara­bia, etc.. So often ‘Uni­ver­sal’ signs or icons don’t take into account dif­fer­ences in other cul­tures. I remem­ber some years back some­thing about Men’s and Women’s room signs not work­ing well in coun­tries where pants vs. dresses or skirts were not nec­es­sar­ily the sole marker of sec­ondary sex char­ac­ter­is­tics. Who knows, maybe some Kilt-wearers in Edin­burgh had to think for a minute.