Environment
Made You Look! - continued
By Bruce Grierson published Jul 1, 2009
The familiar becomes invisible. That’s why signs on the North Shore feature rhinos and dead bodies
Four summers ago, the deer problem on the North Shore was officially out of hand, and the District of North Vancouver's wildlife committee was pressuring city council to take action. The problem was this: too many deer were getting creamed by cars. Carcasses were routinely being dragged from the asphalt of Mt. Seymour Parkway and Lower Dollarton Highway. The culprit, of course, wasn't the deer but the drivers. Deer will cross roads; drivers on such stretches need to reduce their speed. And too many drivers weren't, despite the presence of Slow: Deer Crossing signs.
James Ridge, then the district's chief administrative officer, called up Cameron Stewart and asked him if he had any ideas. Stewart isn't a psychologist; he trained as a sign painter and now heads up the district's sign shop. But Stewart was known for making signs that people actually obey. His niche is what might be called novelty signage: sober authority in the design paired with almost corny whimsicality in the message. He has persuaded dog owners to poop-scoop with signs like Dog Guardians: In a World Where Everyone Is Looking Out for Number One, Who's Taking Care of Number Two? And walkers to route around public gardens with signs like These Flower Beds Are Now Metric: Please No Feet.
The deer problem was obviously more serious but its mechanics were the same. The human mind responds to sensory clutter-for instance, the blizzard of marketing messages we're exposed to each day-by attending only to what's novel. That's the problem with those familiar yellow deer-crossing signs: they're so familiar, they're effectively invisible. Stewart knew something quite different was required. He'd been experimenting with Native artwork of a symbolic deer. He had roughed out a design "just to process the idea," and it was up on his easel when in walked a colleague, one of the district's most conservation-conscious workers. The fellow wasn't in a good mood to begin with, and it got worse when he saw Stewart's attempt at lateral thinking.
"You might as well put a fucking kangaroo on there," the colleague said, shaking his head. "Right then the light went on," Stewart recalls. "I looked for a kangaroo in my clip art, and I didn't have one. But I had camels and rhinos."
