Seeing the Signs

Friend of TAoN Kate Canales — a designer and educator who says her “design super power” is “noticing” — recently published a very charming and smart TED talk about “makeshift signs.” That is, the familiar handwritten or similarly informal signs that annotate the physical world with useful, even necessary, information and guidance. These are “everyday instructions,” signs that “help us think,” Kate maintains. They are, she further contends, “examples of ingenious human problem-solving.”Kate’s been noticing, and photographing, such signs for a couple of decades. As she says in the talk:These signs are evidence that we still need each other, out here in the real world, to do some very basic things. The person who came before us took the time to leave some instructions, to make sure that our experience is a little bit better than theirs. And that is a sign of humanity that I am always happy to stumble upon. Check out her eight-minute talk for many (frequently funny) examples — definitely…