Empathetic signage–with thanks to Daniel Pink
After looking forward to Daniel Pink’s presentation for over a year, a four-hour flight delay kept me away. Luckily, Kathy Fredrick, who is writing Web 2.0 articles for School Library Media Activities Monthly in alternate months with me this year, was there and has this guest blog post!
Daniel Pink’s talk was A-MAZ-ING! I sat with a high school librarian from my district, and we are going to go back to our district and talk about empathetic signage at our next librarian’s meeting. I know we can make a huge difference with our students by acknowledging their emotion around our “no eating,” “keep the noise down,” etc. The one example that he used was waiting for a line in an art museum cafeteria. Just as he was ready to melt down, he saw a sign: “Don’t worry, the line moves quickly.” How sweet…
Kathy’s comments echo what most people had to say about Dan Pink’s talk. The idea of empathetic signage seems to be one of the most resonant points of his keynote. I hope Kathy will share her librarians’ ideas after their next meeting.
For those of you who are equally taken with the idea of empathetic signage, you might also want to check out Dan Pink’s blog, where, in the past several weeks, he posted quite a few times about the topic. It’s neat to see how the idea kept growing until the point that he presented about it!
He also made a pecha kucha slideshow about empathetic signage. Pecha kucha is a new Japanese fad where you make a PowerPoint presentation with exactly 20 slides, and each slide stays up for exactly 20 seconds. What a great idea to put a new spin on an increasingly worn-out warhorse. (Another PowerPoint game I’ve read about is an improvisational speech. A random PowerPoint is downloaded from the Web on who-knows-what topic, then you have to fake your way through the speech. How geeky is it to actually think this could be a fun party game?)
I wonder if this Web site, that generates signs that look like highway signs, could help us on the journey to more whimsical signage.
Speaking of signage, you might want to check out Debbie Stafford’s post to the AASL blog about an AASL session on designing media centers. Presenter Steven Baule suggested that when you build or redesign a library, you should put up temporary signs, see how they work, then order the “real” signs. What a great idea, and a very student-centered one!