The final part of the our final brief was the installation of our signs. After discussing the arrows my team agreed to stick the arrows down and we decided to put them on the “wrong” side to see if people would walk on the right even though the majority of people would be used to walking/driving on the left.
Along the corridor we put up all the signs we had each made. The purpose of these was to catch peoples attention so that we could observe their reaction, this means that we didn’t actually expect people to run down the corridor because a sign told them to.
In reality most people paid very little attention to the signs and didn’t seem to really notice them unless they were intentionally looking at the installations around DJCAD. However, the arrows did actually have a very big impact on how people were behaving. Despite normally walking on the left of corridors, a large percentage of people subconsciously started walking on the right (like the arrows suggested. Additionally, I noticed that people were more likely to follow the arrows if they were alone then they were if they were in a group. I think this is really interesting and could be an indication of how different factors could affect how likely we are to follow signs and by extension rules. I also observed that people were more likely to follow the arrows the second or third time they walked by. I actually expected the opposite to be true because I thought they would get used to the signs and start ignoring them but in reality they just accepted the change and adhered to it.
Overall I think the arrows were actually the most successful part of the whole installation because they actually affected the way people were moving around the space and started conversations. I feel the signs were less successful as they didn’t really have an impact on the way people were acting. However, I do still think it was fairly successful and our “Intervention” fulfilled the purpose set out in the brief: “Create physical signage and/or objects that will affect the behaviour of people within a chosen space both physically and mentally. ” And the arrows definitely did this.
To be honest, I don’t think my group worked very well together. For starters, one member of the group was never in class and as a result didn’t take part in the brief. Additionally, we really struggled to come up with an idea that everyone was happy with and as a result people kept on making decisions without talking to the rest of the group which lead to changes in the design. However, in the end we did actually have a fairly successful project and learnt a lot.
Lois Faye Design 