posted solely for educational purposes.
Notes on the icons:
- The female and male icons are indicated by conventions of dress and hair style that are highly cultural specific.
- The convention of designating toilet facilities by gender is cultural specific. It would be more efficient to provide private stalls regardless of gender.
- The conflation of sex and excretory processes within cultures could fill a library and we won't take that tangent.
- Certainly the mouse hole is understood as not indicating a toilet facility, is not gender specific, and is not like the other two, more familiar icons above it.
- One does not expect to see an icon for a mouse in juxtaposition with the more familiar icons in this cultural context
- The brain is startled with the sudden incongruity and disruption in an established pattern and struggles to resolve the meaning of the new situation.
- An analysis reveals that this is an intentional placement of pictorial sign symbols in an arrangement designed to meet the requirements of a cartoon, i.e. a joke.
- Analysis complete, the brain determines a response level appropriate to the amount of surprise, confusion, stress, etc., that has been caused and relieved by determination that this is an a version of the template established during infancy when one's caretaker would attack one with tickling.
Okay...
I wonder if Non Sequitar is funny today...
tags: humor iconographics analysis
Four hospitals are designing wayfinding systems and currently researching graphic symbols being designed by teams of university Design students:
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