Mr. Takahashi I would like to start by telling you about some of the work I have been involved with in the past. I divide design into 2D planar design, space, 3D objects such as products, and 2.5D objects such as apparel. These different design categories have tended not to overlap each other in the past.
Personally, I define design as an intellectual process. When the word "design" was imported into the language, it was equated with the Japanese word "isho". I think this is a good translation, although I feel it focuses too much on the substantive meanings such as "color" and "shape".

Other terms that are seldom heard in recent times are "keijijo" (metaphysical) and "keijika" (material). You can think of "keijijo" as referring to the inner psychological world while "keijika" refers to the concept of shape itself. However, as I mentioned above, the meaning of the word "isho" nowadays tends to focus too much on the "keijika" aspect. In practice, however, before arriving at this shape, actual design involves going through a process that includes things like "concept" and this process can be considered to be "keijijo".
Sometimes, when talking in detail with clients after a particular design has been rejected, the opinions they express indicate that they do not understand whether "the problem is that the logic (the "keijijo") behind the design is faulty" or whether "it is the actual color, shape, or so on (the "keijika") of the design output that is the problem". If this distinction is not clear, the discussion can end up going round in circles and progress can be difficult.

The work I have been involved with in the past has included things like sign design as well as industrial design. This has included the design of logotypes, although I have the impression that words like logotype and symbol tend to be used interchangeably.
Originally, back in the era of mechanical printing, a logotype was a set of special typefaces prepared for specific words. That is, the original meaning was something different to a symbol or mark.

Today's presentation is about "mobile technology and space" and I would like to focus my talk on sign planning as a way of providing some suggestions regarding the question of how best to provide spatial information. In general terms, sign planning can be summarized as being about determining what information should be provided in the spaces inside buildings and elsewhere around the premises.
Although sign planning is becoming an increasing part of my work, I would not consider myself to be a professional in the field of signage. Thinking about why it is that this work is increasing, I believe it comes down to the fact that signage involves a wide range of different work, including planning, graphic design, and design of the physical fittings, and these are things I have always wanted to do. I thought I could have a go at anything.
The work process itself consists of preparing a layout plan, listing up the signs to be used, considering what graphics to use in the information being presented, and then designing the physical fittings accordingly.

The word sign has the general meaning of "something that is perceived" and at this point I would like to give a brief summary of what a sign is.
The first thing that tends to come to mind when thinking of signs is that their purpose is to convey information. They include commercial billboards and all sorts of displays. However, in terms of visuality and semantics, I also see elements of signage in the scenery.
For example, "a lone cedar tree overlooking a village" acts as a landmark but also has meaning as a symbol for the sentiment of the village's people. More than just the information it conveys, I think this sign is also imbued with a rich emotional or psychological meaning.

There are a number of different types of sign.
One type is the identification sign or location sign that indicates what a place is, such as a room number sign like "Room 509", a toilet symbol, or a building name.
Information signs provide information about "what happens here".
Direction signs show a direction with an arrow or similar.
Regulation signs, also called prohibition signs, indicate what you are not allowed to do. Examples include "no smoking" and "no cameras" signs.
Orientation signs provide guidance such as notices about today's events. Orientation signs and information signs have much in common and are sometimes lumped together. If we are to make a distinction, it could be that orientation signs often involve a map.
Decoration signs act as monuments such as the sign at the Karakuri Clock.

Next I will talk about the practical aspect of the work which involves deciding where to position all of these different types of sign.
An initial consideration is that we need to know the path taken by visitors. While there is sometimes a tendency to adopt the logic of the information provider, the important thing is to consider what people coming to the location will be thinking.
To do this, we consider the different types of visitor and their objectives. Access is also important. Will they be coming by train or by car? Once in the building, they won't necessarily stay on the same level and may move up or down between floors. In this case, the path they take will differ depending on whether they use the elevator or the stairs.
Also, if the building has a symmetrical design with no spatial reference points, if the scene is the same from any corner of the building, for example, this structure will make it difficult for users to know where they are. In cases like this, additional touches can be added to the original signage such as using a different theme color in each corner.

Next I would like to talk about visualizing signs. My idea of an ideal sign is one that conveys the required information at the required time.
The ideal would be something that just pops up when you think you need it, but this remains technically difficult. There is also a tendency amongst architects with a artistic bent to be indifferent to the form of signs.
In recent times, pictographs and ideographs have also gained in popularity as a way of conveying information. Because these are non-verbal, which is to say they do not rely on language, they have the advantage that they can provide information to people with different native languages. The set of pictograms published by the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), which are free of any copyright restrictions, are widely used. A JIS standard also exists and graphic designers propose new ones at each Olympics.
The process of deciding what to place where on a piece of land is called plotting. This involves looking at a plan and working out the travel routes and what to place at each point.

Next, let's consider "what information is desirable, and where?"
Once the travel routes have been marked out on the plan, there is a conventional way of going about signage. However, the routes people use are not necessarily the ones indicted by signs. Rather, in addition to looking at the plan view, the ability to consider how the building works as a three dimensional entity is also important. Information is always clearer if viewed front on, but unless you understand what the front-on position is relative to, the signs may be difficult to see.
When considering how to direct people by the shortest route to locations such as toilets and, in particular, to the exits, entries and emergency exits that are critical in times of emergency, the tendency is to think about how to express this and, if the expression is dull, to consider how the expression can be accented by providing some form of monument or similar.

Mr. Takahashi A comment made by many people who do actual work in this field is that they commonly face problems of viewing distance and size. In the case of text, they need to consider what it is they are trying to show and from what distance, not just in terms of ergonomics but also with consideration for the science of color. Examples of this are that using green on a red background is a problem for those with green or red color blindness, whereas white text on a black background is easy to read as it looks larger. If you have to use small characters, you should deliberately put these on a black background. You should also be thinking about font design and the balance of white space.
You also need to consider the broader contextual and presentational aspects that accompany the information you are conveying. The crowded-looking Mincho font was not traditionally considered suitable for signs but the sparse design of the Gothic font does not suit locations built in a Japanese style and you need to achieve a balance with these presentational aspects when you consider the design of your signage.

Mr. Takahashi That's for insurance. Because pictograms are learnt in the context of cultural norms, it is possible that the convention of the pictogram may not be understood. The text is provided as a backup for such cases.

Mr. Tanaka In the case of people viewing the web, the final representation is not unique in that the display changes depending on the browser and other system factors. I think this is a serious problem for thinking about signs in media like this.

Mr. Watanabe Looking from the perspective of the four categories that are commonly used in installing signs: hanging, protruding, wall-mounted or free-standing, how should we think about, for example, a sign that is located on the ground.

Mr. Takahashi I use these frequently. In exhibitions , for example. Using hanging signage to display information is too dangerous for rooms with a vaulted ceiling, for example, and there are often height restrictions in car parks. Sometimes placing the signs on the ground is necessary in these sorts of cases. However, there is a difference between doing this as part of an effective graphic design compared with a botch-up job where the sign is only put there because there is nowhere else for it.

Mr. Watanabe Signs that we create for ourselves such as indicating where people should queue for a bank ATM don't have input from designers and these signs are customized by the users of the space, and as the space changes with passing time, so too does the sign. Given that this situation exists, rather than fixed signage, how should we think about signs for variable information such as those used by the mobile tools we are dealing with here?

Mr. Takahashi I think changing information can still be presented to some extent, even in the case of free-standing signs.
It is a common situation for a building to be very clean and tidy when it is built, but signs produced by printing on A4 paper are then put up using tape or similar and (train stations tend to be like this) many examples can be found where people just put these up where they want because the administrators "don't want to move themselves". Of course this sometimes occurs at the design stage in cases such as when the travel routes are misread. Rather than being a problem with the site, though, the problem in this case is that the necessary information is missing.

When thinking about these things, I like to think in terms of the "rhythm of information". This is about whether, for example, it is OK just to put up "start" and "end" at the beginning and end when the path you are signposting is a direct one with no branches. Of course, this is not always the case and there are times when people will feel very concerned if information is not provided. Even when information is provided, I believe that consideration along the lines of "I have walked this far so it should be around here somewhere, I need a sign that tells me how many more meters to go" is needed. If this rhythm of signage placement is poor, the result will be that the signs are too intrusive in one place but insufficient elsewhere and consequently the workers at the site will consider that to many signs are being put up. Not everyone can read this from a plan. The attitude of a manager from the construction company, for example, might be that "its OK so long as the information is provided" or "each sign costs 100,000 yen, why don't we just get 400 yen signs from an ordinary retailer?". The amount of information conveyed may be the same but the quality will be different. I think this will also disrupt the rhythm of signage placement and therefore detract from the overall quality of the space.

I don't think this sense of distance or rhythm is "just a matter of presenting information in any old variable format". If you have a methodology that can successfully handle this, I think it could well provide new opportunities for variable signage.

Mr. Matsuo It was mentioned earlier that problems arise if there is too much information. Is reducing the amount of information you display one available technique?

Mr. Takahashi First of all, I think it depends on whether the person who is producing the information has clearly organized the priority and directory structure of the information.
Particularly at banks, whether it is how to use an ATM or presenting information on a web site, it seems to me that these aspects have often not been properly sorted out and so are hard to use.

Improving this situation is not about bringing in a designer, but rather I think it is something that can be solved by increasing the number of designers in the broader sense of the term by which I mean, to recap my earlier presentation, the people able to be involved in the intellectual process. Unfortunately, we don't seem to be taught these sorts of things in Japan. For example, whereas in Japan we tend to think of design students as being like a reserve army of designers, I understand that overseas they don't have 80 people per class and the graduates get jobs at ordinary companies with the idea "I have studied design, I can use this as a base to help me go about my work." Rather than thinking that because they have studied design they should work as designers, the fact that they have been exposed to model making and all sorts of other aspects of design means they can also take on roles that involve acting as a judge of designs within their company. It is about whether design is part of our cultural standards, our heritage.

Mr. Watanabe Going back to the interaction you go through with clients in relation to a design, you are saying that the problem lies in the fact that nobody in the client company is able to judge the design process, and although they have left the design job up to you, their response to the design is simply "I'm not sure what it is but I just don't like it".

Mr. Takahashi A common issue is that the client has not sorted out what it is they want. If an outside agency or designer comes in at that point they are unable to judge, and the clients themselves don't understand the process nor how to judge. Instead you can get the sort of situation where they bring into the procurement team someone who "did a few oil paintings for a hobby some time ago". Ultimately, even if it is OK that they base their decision on personal taste, it will be difficult to advance the project if they are unable to share in the process. Because I think this is the sort of thing that you can only learn through on-the-job training, the clients also need to do quite a bit of study.

Mr. Matsuo You talked earlier about using audio to convey information. Other than audio, what different sorts of signage can be used?

Mr. Takahashi It is said that about 80% of the information we take in is visual, so I guess the rest would be hearing and touch information.
However, in terms of the information volume, the non-visual information may tend to be secondary information in that it acts to support the visual information.

Mr. Watanabe An observation that Naoto Fukazawa made a while ago was that the young people who can be seen texting as they walk along the platform at Shibuya station use the guide blocks provided for the blind to find their way along. This is an interesting example.
It is like they are making their own interpretation of the information available in the environment, and making effective use of secondary information.

There was a well known work session called Dialog in the Dark. This involved walking through complete darkness accompanied by a visually impaired person. The result of having your visual sense taken away from you in the darkness, like a feeling of pressure, gives you the impression that your other senses of hearing, smell, touch, and a sort of sixth sense become amplified. This experience clearly demonstrates not only how much you rely on your sense of sight, but also how you try to mobilize your remaining senses.

Mr. Takahashi You are talking about pitch darkness when you can't even see things that are close to you.

Mr. Fukushima Some restaurants where you eat in complete darkness have opened recently. It is a sort of performance where blind people guide you through the darkness.

Mr. Watanabe A bar that was in complete darkness was also provided at the end of the Dialog in the Dark where you could drink things like wine but you had no idea what you were drinking. This workshop was first held in Germany and in that case people paid money at the end but had no idea how much they were paying. Instead the blind people told them, "you haven't paid enough". It sounds like an incredible experience.

Mr. Takahashi It is said that honey bees can see over a wider range of the spectrum than humans can. That is, compared to honey bees, our sense of sight is incomplete, which is to say there is no absolute.
Our eyes adapt to the light level in places like tunnels. If this didn't happen our eyes would not be able to cope with the brightness when we emerge from the tunnel. Copier machines also have similar compensation mechanisms and can now produce high quality results. What should we think in the light of this knowledge.

Mr. Watanabe At the beginning, the Intercross Creative Center in Sapporo came up as an example of building renovation. In 2029 it is unlikely that new buildings will be able to be put up where ever we want. There will be stronger demands for sustainability and, rather than just erecting new buildings indiscriminately, providing new value to existing structures incrementally will become more important. I believe that the methodology of signage will be an important indication of this time. To avoid just making new things indiscriminately, I started thinking instead about how information spaces can be linked to the real world.

Car telephones in 1979 could be used for voice communications but did not have any data transfer capability. The next ten years or so could be thought of as the voice-centric era.
Data transfer first became possible in the second generation of devices and initially offered a few tens of kilobits per second.
Subsequently, transmission speeds increased steadily and this is likely to continue in the future. However, radio transmission is significantly different to transmission over media such as optical fiber. In practice, the speed of radio transmission cannot be increased as much. Although the speeds appear to be increasing, the problem lies in providing a guarantee. In the second generation, the implication was that the speed was guaranteed for everyone. In the next generation, this changed to "best effort", which means that with effort you can achieve the advertised speed but this is not guaranteed. In other words, if everyone uses it at the same time the speed will decrease, so that the apparent transmission speeds are increasing even though the transmission efficiency has not increased. Next, in addition to "best effort", the terminology will change to claims such as that you can achieve 14Mbit/sec but only in certain conditions such as when you are close to a base station.

When considering what transmission speeds may be possible in 2029, it seems likely that advances in transmission speed will follow different paths for indoor and outdoor operation. As the density and usage are likely to be different in each of these environments, I think we can predict that advances will be made in ways that suit their different circumstances.
A speed of 14Mbit/sec is roughly the same as the transmission speed for high-definition video. However, this doesn't mean that everyone will be able to watch high-definition. Instead, it will be subject to conditions such as that no one else is using data communications in your vicinity or that you are close to the base station. The reality is more likely to be something around 3.6Mbit/sec.
It is thought that future mobile phones will be able to achieve speeds of 1Gbit/sec or higher indoors but that in urban environments a bandwidth of around 1Gbit/sec will be shared by everyone.
Outside city centers, these sorts of speeds will be available if the output power is increased, but this may be difficult given the shape of a mobile phone and, remembering that mobile phones are used close to the body, there are medical limits whereby the thermal effects on the body are only acceptable up to a certain level. Still, I believe that these sorts of speeds can be reached in devices such as PCs.

I believe that wireless LANs and similar communication systems should be able to reach speeds of around 10Gbit/sec in the future.
Wireless has advantages other than speed and advances will not be limited just to devices that operate at these sorts of speeds. I expect there will be a growing number of uses for wireless tags that may be slow but are extremely small, and that applications such as sensor networks will emerge.

In terms of ITS applications, use of wireless communications to transfer traffic information is already a reality, and in the future I expect it will be possible to use wireless technology to implement applications such as detecting potential collisions and using this to adjust the distance between vehicles or, if a collision does occur, to reduce its impact.

Mr. Tanaka The available frequency bands are very important. I know there are all sorts of government considerations, but can we expect these to be widened in the future.

Professor Nakajima Because available frequencies are a limited resource much like land, these have to be allotted. Higher frequencies tend to have limited range and, although lower frequencies can travel further, they cannot be made to carry many channels compared to higher frequencies which have the advantage that they can handle large numbers of channels.

Mr. Tanaka In other words, you need to be concerned with what frequency bands you can use even when building an experimental prototype. There have been calls to open up certain frequency bands for experimental use. That is, there is a desire to have a free band for university research use.

Professor Nakajima As with radio, it is conceivable that we can find ways of doing things that give users a certain amount of freedom. Something like software radio.
It is also possible to make effective use of the spectrum by having the equipment identify unused radio frequencies.
A lot of progress has happened in America towards transmitting services such as TV via cable and it will be interesting to see how the spectrum freed up by this process is used.

Mr. Watanabe It's as if the comment that Nicholas Negroponte made, about wireless being for broadcasting and cables for communication, will be turned on its head so that cables are used for broadcasting and wireless for communications.
Technologies like FON are also emerging.

Mr. Maeda You will be able to find a free spot even if you are riding in a taxi.

Mr. Takahashi There was the case some time ago of a cabinet minister whose hobby was radio control and as a result the number of available bands suddenly shot up. With deregulation, maybe the problem could be solved if only some sort of otaku or nerd could get the job of minister.

Mr. Maeda A recent TV program showed the idea of using GPS to automate construction work. I think the way the technology has progressed directly from surveying to the use of GPS is amazing.
I am also interested in satellite communications.

Professor Nakajima Satellites have advantages in spread-out regions like in America or China but less so in Japan, and so the scope of their use is gradually getting smaller.

Mr. Takahashi Talking of GPS, I have heard that the surface of the earth is moving and there are problems caused by differences between old plans and the current situation. Whereas a person working on the site can allow for this, I understand it is difficult for a machine to correct for this automatically.