I am a little less discouraged by this steadily increasing specificity. Part of that is cynicism about people investing thought into things and another part is realism about the mental load people undertake during the course of the day.
The cynicism part is best illustrated by my own twenty-year-old sign experience. Here in the DC area we have lots of monuments, and one of the more modern ones is the FDR memorial. It has some water features placed within it - it's a rather long and rambling exhibit - but I guess the designers had never met tourists and didn't anticipate folks would throw change in the water. Apparently they didn't design it to be sufficiently robust and coins caused some sort of issue. So they put up the sign that irked me. It said
Coins Damage Fountain
And that was it. And the feature continued to be full of coins.
At the time I had a purely cynical reaction to it, thinking "This is too disconnected from action for the average chump to get. You can't just tell them about a fact and expect them to connect it to their actions such that they'll stop. At absolute best they'll look at this and feel abashed many seconds after they have already taken the coins out of their pocket and flung them in. More likely they'll never make the connection at all."
Now that time has passed and I've read a lot more things about people's ability to shoulder a mental load, decision fatigue, etc etc, I'm a little less judgmental about it but I still think the sign is a mistake: if we want people to get people's attention and have them take an action we need to make it as quick and decisive as possible. We cannot ask them to draw some conclusions because they don't give a damn and are thinking about a dozen other things already.
The bus sign is the same thing. We can't reason with folks that their spilled food is a problem. Aside from the sizable percentage who are absolutely sure that THEY will never spill food - people are horrible at assessing risks - that's too many steps removed to get through to people who are thinking about something else and doing their bare minimum mental effort necessary to complete their commute. Adding "on bus" isn't a reaction to people thinking that all of Cardiff had become a nutrient-free zone, it's a way to get folks who aren't paying attention to make a connection between their current situation and the sign they might otherwise ignore.
I am a little less discouraged by this steadily increasing specificity. Part of that is cynicism about people investing thought into things and another part is realism about the mental load people undertake during the course of the day.
The cynicism part is best illustrated by my own twenty-year-old sign experience. Here in the DC area we have lots of monuments, and one of the more modern ones is the FDR memorial. It has some water features placed within it - it's a rather long and rambling exhibit - but I guess the designers had never met tourists and didn't anticipate folks would throw change in the water. Apparently they didn't design it to be sufficiently robust and coins caused some sort of issue. So they put up the sign that irked me. It said
Coins Damage Fountain
And that was it. And the feature continued to be full of coins.
At the time I had a purely cynical reaction to it, thinking "This is too disconnected from action for the average chump to get. You can't just tell them about a fact and expect them to connect it to their actions such that they'll stop. At absolute best they'll look at this and feel abashed many seconds after they have already taken the coins out of their pocket and flung them in. More likely they'll never make the connection at all."
Now that time has passed and I've read a lot more things about people's ability to shoulder a mental load, decision fatigue, etc etc, I'm a little less judgmental about it but I still think the sign is a mistake: if we want people to get people's attention and have them take an action we need to make it as quick and decisive as possible. We cannot ask them to draw some conclusions because they don't give a damn and are thinking about a dozen other things already.
The bus sign is the same thing. We can't reason with folks that their spilled food is a problem. Aside from the sizable percentage who are absolutely sure that THEY will never spill food - people are horrible at assessing risks - that's too many steps removed to get through to people who are thinking about something else and doing their bare minimum mental effort necessary to complete their commute. Adding "on bus" isn't a reaction to people thinking that all of Cardiff had become a nutrient-free zone, it's a way to get folks who aren't paying attention to make a connection between their current situation and the sign they might otherwise ignore.