Challenge 1 of 52: Emergency Instruction

To kick this year long challenge, I pick this humble emergency fire extinguisher notice. I found this in the LRT when I’m meeting up the Tandemic team to go to Penang. I always thought of doing something with the LRT for the first challenge so this is will be a good start.

This particular notice draws me for several reason. First, is the extreme condition when you actually need to depend on this particular instruction. If you need to follow it then there’s something burning in the LRT. Gasp, it might even be the LRT itself. Considering the fact that you are in a confined space make facing a fire in an LRT a nightmarish proposition indeed. So a clear instruction and a working fire extinguisher will be a welcome relief.

This bring us to the second point which if you see closely, there’s a non-instruction among the three steps. No. 2: Alarm will SOUND. What does that supposed to mean? It’s interesting to note that the Malay version doesn’t capitalize ‘berbunyi’. Sound is not an action for you to take. You are only supposed to pull the handle and remove the extinguisher.

But then, not telling ahead the alarm will sound will make the user panic. He will think, what else have gone wrong? But at the same time the non-instruction muddles the instruction.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll present the proposed solution just for the English version of the instruction:

The whole idea is to make the instruction clearer and not overwhelm the user in emergency. So at the outside panel it simply states there’s an emergency fire extinguisher inside and instruct the user to pull to open. The handle is highlighted red to emphasize the instruction.

Once opened, there is the next instruction to remove the extinguisher. Notification about the alarm is put in a distinctively different panel to differentiate them. This tells that it is not an instruction – just informing that the alarm will go off.

Well, that’s it for my first challenge. Looking forward for a new one next week. Do leave your feedback after reading!