Wiki Worthing?

One of the talking points today has been street signage. Apparently the council recently spent £30,000 on new signs to mark the way from the station to the town centre, but this didn’t prevent several of our thinktankers getting lost as they tried to find their way to Flashbang.

Here’s a map of the different routes we ended up coming by:

Listening to people discuss the signage, I found myself thinking that this was quite an old school approach to generating “content”. What if you opened up the creation and organisation of signs around a town, as a kind of physical version of a wiki?

You could open up an unused shop as a DIY sign-making workshop, invite people to drop off scrap wood, unneeded paint, etc — and invite anyone to make signs for things they thought should be pointed out, and fix them anywhere that it’s practical to fix a sign. The idea is to see whether, over time, people’s collective participation leads to the emergence of something more useful and interesting than resulted from the professional approach.

I think I got the idea from this project by Art-in-a-Van, which was one of my favourite moments at Brixton Village:

I have to say, my “wiki signage” idea was not received with universal enthusiasm among the group! There seemed to be a feeling that signage needs to be controlled, managed and optimised by an expert eye, or the result will be practical confusion and an aesthetic disaster zone.

If Worthing (or somewhere else) was crazy enough to try out this experiment, though, it might be that some social rules could help edge it in the right direction. For example, people would need to feel they had permission to take down a sign, as much as to put one up. And maybe you would need a non-commercial or non-self-promotion rule, a bit like Wikipedia’s ban on writing or editing your own entry?

What interests me about this is that it’s an example of how social customs and practices that evolve in online environments could spill out into “First Life” — how our experience of the internet can alert us to different social possibilities in the places and situations where we were to begin with.

So, do I really think it would work? I’ve no idea — and I don’t know Worthing well enough to tell whether it would be a good place to try the experiment. But there is — as I wrote about a few months ago, on a SCIBE trip to Bromley-by-Bow — an energy that comes from little, improvised, hacked-together ways of making spaces, a playful spirit that makes it more fun to walk through an area.

And maybe the goal shouldn’t be the most efficient journey through the town? As the historian Jo Guldi argues, improving transport networks can actually increase social isolation, as strangers no longer talk to each other in public spaces. So if an outbreak of handmade signs around Worthing leads to confusion, perhaps it will be a sociable confusion in which we end up having to ask each other for directions?