Digital Signage and Wayfinding

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March 08, 2009

What's "Digital Signage" and Why Are You Writing About It?

When we started this project, we thought "digital signage" was equivalent to "PowerPoint presentations on TVs in lobbies." It turns out that there are hundreds of commercial solutions out there, from warmed-over PowerPoint to ultra-shiny and sophisticated interactive signage applications.

If you're interested, start by reading the Wikipedia article on Digital Signage. It's pretty good, although it concentrates mostly on retail and commercial applications for the technology, and doesn't answer a lot of the questions that come up when talking about signage for higher education. For example, it doesn't include anything about wayfinding, or about emergency messaging. I guess I should fix it. For now, though, I'm just going to expand on it here.

"Static Signage"

This is what you've seen around, like at the grocery store or at the mall - a monitor, divided into "regions," with different kinds of stuff in each region (announcements, advertisements, the weather, a stock ticker, or event calendars).

Interactive Wayfinding

Some signage solutions allow you or the supplier to design and build interactive applications - much like a simple Web application. These could be built to do just about anything a Web app can do, but most of these are designed to let you look things up in a directory and show you maps.

One of the main problems we encounter in our public spaces is that we have guests, new students, patients, visitors, and conference attendees, and these people have never been here before, and they get lost. "Analog" signs work sometimes. What if we had a network of touch-enabled screens on campus where people could look up what they wanted and be guided there?

Emergency Messaging

Recent tragedies on university campuses make the need for emergency messaging clear, and there's always the potential for natural disasters about which the community needs to be notified. Having multiple vectors to distribute emergency messages is a necessity. We can use e-mail or SMS messages, but the SMS protocol is less than reliable, and people in public spaces aren't all checking their e-mail. Digital signs prove to be a very effective way of disseminating this kind of information in the event of an emergency.

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It's important to us to be able to share the lessons we've learned in the last year and a half, because there are a lot of them, and we want to help other campus communities make the right decisions. We've been really happy to receive communication from a bunch of other institutions already. Get in touch!

Administrivia: this blog will be displayed in forward-chronological order until I'm done with the history part, and then I'll flip it when it becomes more of a traditional blog kind of a thing.

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Comments and conversation are encouraged!

Thanks for visiting and check back often. (There's a "syndicate this site" link around here somewhere, too.)

Interested in participating? Need digital signs in your facility? Have specific questions? Post a comment here or contact the author.

Posted by dchase at March 8, 2009 08:09 PM

Comments

Posted by: jcbazil@gmail.com at March 24, 2009 12:12 AM

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