Confusing signs

Design - Hugh Aldersey-Williams on the pitfalls of graphic instruction

When the lifts break down in the Tower of Babel, you can be sure of finding your way to the emergency stairs. There'll be plenty of those illuminated green and white signs that show a man running through an open doorway. It is one of the few graphic symbols aside from road signage that is internationally agreed and widely understood.

The general rule is that as products have become more complex and diverse, so the graphics produced in order to show how to assemble or operate them or to indicate when things go wrong have become both more prevalent and, it sometimes seems, less intelligible. The trend is driven not only by the nature of the products themselves but by growing global markets. Users in more countries speaking more languages push manufacturers away from written instructions and towards universal graphic ones. (It would be too much to hope that it might push them all the way to making things that need no instructions at all.) Here truly are pictures worth their thousand words.

Or maybe not. For many graphic instructions are ill thought out, badly drawn and obviously produced in haste. Clearly manufacturers are reluctant to spend even a fraction of what they save in translation fees for the text of traditional instructions on commissioning a graphic designer who has the intellectual wherewithal as well as the draughtsmanship to explain how to assemble a flat-packed shelf or tie a bow-tie. For these operations, the lack of clear instruction is a minor frustration. It is an altogether more serious business when the task is to communicate vital information about health and medicine in regions where illiteracy is high - circumstances in which, even if the illustrations are functionally comprehensible, they can still easily cause cultural offence.

Perhaps wisely, Paul Mijksenaar and Piet Westendorp, the authors of a catalogue of examples of instructional design, steer away from these weighty issues. They make their point instead with humour and allow the examples to do what they were designed to do, which is to speak for themselves. Some are more articulate than others.

There are occasional glories such as the instructions for stripping down a 1927 German typewriter with each stage in the process shown on a transparent overlay so that pages can be peeled away as parts of the machine are removed. Homage is paid to the exploded view. Was it another invention of Leonardo da Vinci? It has been around a long time and remains the best way to illustrate the assembly of many objects. Many of the illustrations make sense, although the sense they make tends to increase as the operation they depict becomes self-evident. A picture of a plug and socket seems hardly necessary when the arrangement of pins on the plug dictates only one course of action anyway.

There are Denis Nordenish out-takes, too, with impenetrable diagrams to explain the working of formerly obvious devices. There are amusingly idealised visions such as the familiar drawing of people in life jackets apparently playing an aquatic version of "Ring a Ring o' Roses" in a calm blue sea in the aftermath of an air crash. Video recorders, photocopiers, milk cartons and cooking instructions have not been forgotten. Nor, of course, has Ikea.

But it is a splendid spoof of this graphic language that best illustrates some of its tropes. An artist by the name of Boudewijn Bjelke shows a procedure for defleaing a cat. There is the conventional starting point of the world as it is (sprawling, scratching cat; bow-tie hanging on hanger; etc). There is the goal to be attained (beaming, composed cat; tie neatly tied around neck). These are clear enough. It's the diagrams in between where the trouble begins, a tableau of ideal scenes that could never be matched in reality (cat rolled in towel waiting for flea powder to act; cat subjected to vacuum cleaner) or, alternatively, diagrams that bear no visible relation to those either side of them.

The style of illustration varies from photographic realism to cartoons, but simple line drawing is always a safe option. Sometimes the drawing is coloured, not because the colour adds vital information but for almost the opposite reason because, as on aircraft safety information sheets, it lessens the chance that people will fret about the scenario they are asked to imagine. Other diagrams make it part of their purpose to mystify, to impress us with their technicality. Think of all those television advertisements depicting the action of dandruff shampoo or of multiple-blade razors.

Perhaps we are missing the point if we expect these designs to succeed in their ostensible instructional aim. There is accidental art here, too. The connection to the work of Warhol, Lichtenstein and Gary Hume is unavoidable. But these are the true originals.

"Open Here: the art of instructional design" by Paul Mijksenaar and Piet Westendorp is published by Thames & Hudson at £17.95

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