Rodrigo Ramirez
“Symbols + Narratives for Activating Emergencies”
An important part of everyday life is interacting with visual information. Here, the integration of graphic elements such as symbols, signs, and pictorial instructions helps people to visualize contents, follow procedures and make decisions. However, events such as emergencies transform such a normality into a disruptive, complex experience, generating uncertainty, communication gaps, and at the same time, large information needs.
Information design emerges as a multidisciplinary field that connects efficient communication and effectiveness to manage everyday interactions (Pontis and Babwahsingh, 2023). It contributes to making information visible, understandable, and easy to transfer into action. Emergencies can be considered as an extreme workfield for Information Design. Articulated by principles such as Crisis Communication (Coombs, 2011), and documents such as Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR, 2015, 2017) Disaster Risk and EmergencyManagement are instruments for emergencies, that contribute to shifting the paradigm from disaster response towards risk management, establishing priorities for action, among them communicating and understanding hazards (Robinson, 2017).
As van Manen et al (2023) state, Design principles can be integrated into Emergency Management bringing certainty, and contributing to mitigating critical experiences. Visual communication tools can make a difference in seeing and helping to understand communications for actions that enhance preparedness, safety or recovery from a disaster. Visuals such as symbols, are widely applied to display opportune information for warnings. However, they also lack measuring their performance. One initiative of open-source symbols for emergencies is Guemil, focused on making the discussion about disaster risk and emergency more accessible and inclusive. Designed as information tools based in evidence, Guemil icons are permanently tested (Ramírez, 2018, 2022).
This presentation in Symbol ’24 Symposium introduces an experimental application of Guemil symbols and sequential narratives, called Information Activators for Emergencies. This is an experimental set of graphic pieces that displays an emergency scenario where symbols and texts are combined sequentially in steps, to visualize critical information and activate how to proceed. Elements from storytelling and instructional design allow the integration of different messages and levels of information to be distributed in both printed and digital media.
Biography
Rodrigo Ramírez is an Associate Professor at the School of Design, UC Chile (Diseño UC). He is also a researcher at the Chilean National Research Center for Integrated Disaster Management, CIGIDEN, and a student in the Doctoral Program at UC Chile Faculty of Communications. He is also a founder of the Design Network for Emergency Management (dnem.org) and the design leader for the Guemil project, an open-source set of symbols for crises and emergencies (guemil.info). Rodrigo has an MA Information Design from Reading University, UK. His interests are typography and information design, crossing both practice and research. He has collaborated in information and type design research and designed for brands, public organizations, and publications.
