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19.05.05 | the Hage

Signage system proposal for refugee camps

made at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Hague
Professor : Gert Dumbar
Team : Sun-Jung Hwang

Two conclusions came out of from our research in the field of refugee camps and Non Governemental Organizations (NGOs) working in emergency situations:

• All NGOs agree on the fact that it is part of their goal to leave some responsibility and therefore dignity to the people they are helping. Even though they provide help, experience and supplies, there is always a concern to help the population to get their lives back also by letting them take actions and decisions as often as possible. For example, when the NGOs provide building material, the population should be able to build their own shelters. This is not about practical reasons but rather about a respectfull attitude towards the other, a way of helping that is far from the ‘do-gooder’ who claims to know what is best for its neighbor. This idea is especially important when you consider NGOs coming from ‘western’ cultures helping population from various other cultures, then, an ‘intrusive’ kind of help can not only be less effective by making the displaced people dependent and assisted, but becomes in fact a form of colonialism.
We thought that our pictogram system should reflect this idea rather than just force feed a readymade signage language (made from our western point of view) to populations of various cultures.

• In the field of emergency, be it from war or from natural disasters, problems arise from the unexpected. How can we then pretend to design a finished set of signs for a disaster or a camp we know so little about ? Even if some infrastructures are constant in refugee camps, the equation still holds a lots of unknowns, especially for us clueless, westernized, graphic design students. What if a singular camp has an infrastructure that no other has ? Because it is impossible to predict emergency, our signage system had to be one that could expand and be modified according to specific needs in specific situations.

In order to meet these requirements, we thought of a grid system, inspired in part by Adrian Frutiger’s book Symbols and Signs: Explorations. These grids allow our signage system to be modified and expanded according to the specific culture or situation in which it is used.

Sun-Jung Hwang & David Benqué