In the Netherlands, we love swimming, boating, doing sports, and playing in open water like lakes, rivers, and the sea. It’s a lot of fun, but it can also be dangerous. That’s why lifeguards watch over many of these places. They use colored flags to show if going into the water is safe. These flags are not just used in the Netherlands but in more than 100 countries around the world.
The flags don’t have any words or pictures, just colors. You can see colors from far away, and everyone can understand them, no matter what language they speak or if they can read. But sometimes, people don’t understand what the flags mean.
We think changing some colors might make the flags easier to understand. Simple drawings, called pictograms, can also help explain what the flags mean. These pictograms could be used in other places too, like on your phone, in weather reports, and on signs near open water.
To find out which colors and pictograms would work best, we invite you to design the flags yourself in this study! The results will show which colors and pictograms are the clearest according to all participants. The more people who join, young and old, the better!
This research was developed by MSc Fenne Roefs, PhD Joshua Snell, and Prof. Chris Olivers from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), in partnership with Weekend of Science. The pictograms were developed by design agency Mijksenaar, in collaboration with the VU and the Dutch Institute for Swimming Water Safety (NIVZ). The experiment was programmed by Sergio Alejandro Gutierrez Maury, Quinten Madari, and Gert Faber from the VU.
Visual language uses images to give information. By 'images', we mean lines, shapes, pictures, and colors. Pictograms are also a part of visual language. Often, visual language is a mix of images and text. This makes the information clearer, more noticeable, or just nicer and more fun to look at!
Pictograms have many benefits:
Interested in learning more about the research or visual language? Or perhaps you'd like to reach out to the researchers for any other reason?
Feel free to email us at info@hoezegjijietsmet.nl.
Copyright ©
