Vienna may soon see gender roles mixed up on generic signage: a generic “male” icon will find his way into the baby the changing room, a somewhat more stylized female icon (with stylish boots and flying hair) will bolt for the emergency exit, and a woman in high heels will take a spill on a slippery floor. I think this is an exceptionally clever idea for a graffiti campaign. Too bad it’s being proposed by the Vienna City Council.

Don’t get me wrong: of course I think it’s a good idea to try to change gender stereotypes, and sure, I’d love to see creative people in government positions getting involved. It’s possible that this kind of campaign might even have some gradual effect on gender stereotypes. More than that, though, I think this campaign would act as the kind of “phenomenological experiment” that the Obey campaign was ostensibly shooting for before it became an underground marketing campaign for designer clothing. I think this new signage would make people question whether they can trust their environment more than whether they could trust societal definitions of gender norms.

In other words, I don’t think this campaign is a good idea as presented. As the article linked above notes, some of the proposed images “cannot actually be produced because they do not comply with EU safety norms which insist on uniformity.” There’s something to that. While I think you can get away with a little wiggle room within “uniformity” standards, highly stylized images with overt connotative messages would potentially fail (at least for awhile) to perform their informational and safety function because of the distraction provided by their (however laudable) sociopolitical function.

I think a better plan would be to make ALL signs gender neutral, to the extent that that’s possible. I know how hard it is to make a gender neutral icon, as I was hired to do just that for a health intervention by the School of Medicine at my University. Anything that had angled sides looked too much like either a dress or broadened shoulders, and anything that looked too straight down the sides looked too much like the generic man icon. Rounded or curvy edges are too suggestive of fat people or hourglass-figure women. Anything that didn’t have limbs or a torso wasn’t recognizably human, and thus failed to hint at basic anatomical regions; some parts of the intervention required placing graphics representing organs (heart, kidneys, liver, brain, etc.) into the generic person icon for various diagrams illustrating the effects associated with heart disease. In the end, it’s hard to say whether what we ended up with was so different from the generic “man”: a rectangular torso with rounded edges, and a circular head and rounded-rectangle limbs disconnected from the torso, splayed out like the points of a star. It was different enough, anyway, to convince us that it was good enough.

Arguably, part of the problem with generic person icons is that a generic “woman” icon was ever designed in the first place. The generic “person” really could have stood in for everybody if we didn’t have a culturally-defined association of that icon with men’s restroom doors, and we could certainly figure out some other symbols to tell people which toilet to use. That possibility has passed now, though.

Maybe I’ll get another chance to take a crack at designing a generic person some day, or maybe some better designer will come along and change the way we look at the stick figure. As stylish as that lady in the boots looks on her way to that emergency exit, we don’t want the people who can’t afford nice boots thinking that they have to leave through the window.