The Reason Clear Signage is Necessary, As Evidenced by a Cruise Ship’s ‘Gripes’ and the Problem of Near-Timeless Nuclear-Waste Storage
November 17th, 2009 | published in Nouns: People, Places, Things.
Afloat in the Caribbean Sea. July 25, 2009.
Team A listed their goal in communication as the simultaneous fulfillment of three objectives: (1) to provide a gestalt message (the whole message is greater than the sum of the parts/components), (2) to use a systems approach, and (3) to incorporate redundancy in the markers.
For the gestalt message, the purpose is to convey a message not just with words and pictures, but through the very vehicles of conveying the messages, and the messages themselves. That is, the marker materials, their construction, and their arrangement are such that future generations coming m upon the markers will understand the message that this place is not one where people would want to spend a lot of time. With the gestalt message, the emphasis is on communicating through the entire marker system.
The systems approach to designing and constructing markers is that the m various marker components are linked to each other and supplement the information (or fill in any gaps) from other marker components. Messages are provided in different levels of complexity, in different formats, and convey different aspects of the entire message.
The redundancy within the marker components provides enough individual markers of any one type (material or message or arrangement) so that if some are vandalized or degraded over time, there are sufficient numbers remaining to communicate the required message. The size and construction of the markers can also provide redundancy in that the form of the communication is overdone so that it can still communicate after degradation or defacement. With earthen berms (discussed later in this section), the size called for would allow the marker to withstand considerable erosion and still remain recognizable as a human construction marking an area.
Excerpted from ‘Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’ by Kathleen M. Trauth, Stephen C. Hora and Robert V. Guzowski. Published by Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the United States Department of Energy, under contract DE-AC04-94AL8500.