Design And Two Spaces: Local Vernacular

In this section I would like to talk a little about the role of the vernacular in local public spaces. In particular, I am interested in exploring the potential intersection between the sign as an informational display and its use of vernacular language (visual and/or text-based). For the purposes of illustration, I begin my journey with a walk through the area in which I reside. For me, the challenge is to find ways of looking and seeing things differently; to jar myself out of a position of routine where seeing the same thing everyday has actually become a position of non-seeing.

Michel de Certeau in his The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) talks about how a walk through a city may be read as an 'urban text'. He proposes that the walker (or 'user of a city') constructs through a process of selection a 'rhetoric of walking' defined by 'turns (tours) and detours that can be compared to "turns of phrase" or "stylistic figures"'. The signs which I encounter in my journey through South London are at the same time informational and metaphorical.

I offer up two brief examples. A few months ago, the local charity shops changed their display windows to reflect a more autumnal theme. Instead of the usual display of clothing on mannequins, their heads were repurposed with large papier-mâché squirrel's heads. Not only did this approach to visual merchandising get the passerby to look twice, but also immediately communicated the arrival of a new consignment. And, we could take this reading to it's logical end, you could equate the notion of thrifting with the squirrels' hoarding of their nuts.

The second example is a small blackboard turned into a sign which each day is propped up against the fence outside the local tea shop. The handwritten text and illustrations of a teapot and cup are sweetly naive. This is reinforced by the use of words such as 'glorious' and 'love' with an authenticity evoked by the use of descriptors such as 'real' and 'home-made'. The last sentence makes the point that 'Evreything (sic) is cooked with love' - with the word everything' misspelled.

Both these examples express an author's or maker's hand. These signs are visually constructed using recognizable forms and techniques forming a language which is read and understood by the way it is 'materially placed in the world'. In other words, it may be suggested quite simply that these signs become as Scollon and Scollon have argued, 'signs in place' (2003).

[caption id="attachment_110" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Charity Shop Window, South London, 2009"]