Scattering Seeds

I attended the inaugural 2009 National Signage Research and Education Conference (NSREC) here in my backyard at the University of Cincinnati (UC), October 13-15. This first industry/collegiate conference for the Signage Foundation Inc. (SFI) served as the first public fruits of Jim Weinel’s significant investment in two endowed chairs at UC.
I wrote two daily reports on the conference,   which you can find here and here, in the  “Legislation” section, which is a component of “Industry News.” They’ll have more detail than I have room for here.
What happened at the conference was very good. However, its significance may not be known for several years. A second such conference will occur in 2010, on virtually the same dates, October 12-14.
I keep going back to Jesus’ parable about the sower’s seeds. Regardless of your religious beliefs, it also works as a fabulous secular metaphor that bears truncated repeating. A sower spread out a bunch of seeds. Some that fell by the wayside were trampled or eaten by birds. Some fell on rocky soil; they sprouted, but they couldn’t get enough water, and they withered. Some fell on decent soil, but weeds and thorns choked them, and they too died. The rest fell on good soil and flourished, and hundreds of new seeds were created.
The various speakers’ words (and the superb conference manual) qualify as seeds, and the various types of attendees represent different types of soil. The 138 conference registrants included some planners and students in either UC’s College of Business or the College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning (DAAP). The business students focus more on signs for their marketing impact, and the DAAP students are geared more toward signs’ legal aspects. Of course, working knowledge of both would be optimum.
Traditionally, planners’ educational exposure predisposes them to rocky or weed-choked soil, but conference attendees could experience previously unknown fertilizer. Mark Olinger, the director of the Madison, WI, planning department, explained how his city approaches signage. The procedures remain partially dubious, given the design review board’s broad subjective latitude, but at least there’s acknowledgment of signs’ value.
Also, Cleveland State University law professor Alan Weinstein (a member of ST’s editorial advisory board) and his cohort, planning consultant David Hartt, presented their model sign code. Perfect? No, the reasoning on financial formulae for amortization seems suspect, but the treatise lives up to its stated purpose of “formulating on-premise sign regulations that fully respect the comprehensive purposes of signs from the perspective of both community and business interests.” Can’t ask for much more than that. In terms of impact, this code could be a sunflower seed. But everything depends on the sowers.
Most important were the attending/contributing students. Most interesting was the work of 4th and 5th-year DAAP students in associate professor Menelaos Triantafillou’s “Workshop in Urban Design” class. Over the summer, they inventoried every sign on a 2.8-mile stretch of Beechmont Ave., which is saturated with non-stop strip malls, car dealerships, standalone retailers, etc. They took photographs every 200 ft.
Their conclusion of clutter was inevitable. Interestingly, however, the students deduced from the photographs that powerlines contributed much more to the clutter than signage. The students then suggested several remedies, heavily influenced by the Weinstein/Hartt model code.
Again, what they concocted is greatly overshadowed by their exposure to, and subsequent objective assessment of, signage.
In the business school, James S. Womack/Gemini Chair of Signage and Visual Marketing professor James Kellaris reported the results of having polled his students as to their attitudes about signage. One group was polled before having seen a presentation on signage; the other was polled after the fact. Kellaris outlined desired subsequent research with regard to visual acuity, creating a design taxonomy and developing a conceptual framework for assessing how people truly react to signage.
Also, Dr. David Edelman, a UC professor and former director of the UC School of Planning, presented the white paper produced by Cambridge University philosophy student Joan Christodoulou, which serves as starting point for a comprehensive list of signage literature, with brief synopses of each. Her 227 entries encompass 72 pages. Another starting point.
Ideally, this additional method of scattering seeds will cultivate more good soil and help transform the sign industry into rock removers, weed pullers and sources of continuous fertilization.