The Rise and Fall of a Worldian Language: Amenity Icons from ISOTYPE to OpenStreetMap

The Rise and Fall of a “Worldian Language”: Amenity Symbols from

ISOTYPE to OpenStreetMapNACIS 2016

Will Payne - Geography PhD Student University of California, Berkeley

I: Interwar Socialist Origins

ISOTYPE: 1924+

ISOTYPE: 1924+

“Few people today read Neurath's original intentions in international picture signs. Like many genres of modern design, the signs have been

thoroughly integrated into corporate and bureaucratic identity programs.”

Ellen Lupton, “Reading ISOTYPE,” 1986.

II: Midcentury Standardization and Style

Rudolf Modley: 1920s+

“What is needed, internationally, is a set of glyphs which does not refer to any single phonological system or to any specific

cultural system of images.”

Margaret Mead, 1966

Rudolf Modley: 1920s+

Fodors: 1960s+

“[I]t is imperative for man to be able to communicate with any other man no matter where he may live. This need, accented by jet travel, is felt universally today. […] Hopefully, with this Sourcebook, standard symbols will some day be understood by all,

regardless of language or culture.”

Henry Dreyfuss, Symbol Sourcebook, 1972

Henry & Doris Dreyfuss: 1972

Henry & Doris Dreyfuss: 1972

“Henry Dreyfuss [is creating] a worldian language so powerfully generalized as to swiftly throw into obsolescence the almost fatally lethal trends of

humanity’s age-long entrapment in specializations.”

Buckminster Fuller, Introduction to Symbol Sourcebook, 1972

Henry & Doris Dreyfuss: 1972

III: The AIGA Legacy

AIGA / U.S. Dept of Transportation: 1974+

AIGA / U.S. Dept of Transportation: 1974+

AIGA / U.S. Dept of Transportation: 1974+

AIGA / U.S. Dept of Transportation: 1974+

AIGA / U.S. Dept of Transportation: 1974+

Google Earth: 2007+

“The chicken wing—or just the silhouette chicken—has never made it to Google Maps for

a reason. These ideas just don’t speak as well as the fork and knife.”

Patrick Hoffman, Cartographer, Google, 2011

Google Maps: 2011+

Bing Maps: 2010+

IV: Lifestyle Segmentation and

Crowdsourcing

Apple Maps: 2012+

Airbnb: 2015+

Zomato (formerly Urbanspoon): 2015+

OpenStreetMap: 2006+

Thank you.