It’s such a good idea that we started thinking why no one has ever thought of it before. That or maybe someone did think about it, but didn’t go past the thinking stage to the actual doing stage. Guess that dude probably cost himself a lot of money.
In any case, Yanko Design’s new Uni-Signal is taking traffic lights and turning them into something that could be of more use, especially to those who are color-blind. So instead of seeing merely colors to determine when to stop or go in a busy intersection, why not put some shapes into it so that those suffering from color blindness won’t have a difficult time determining whether they’re free to go or whether they should stop. In their example, the Uni-Signal incorporates a triangle shape/red color for stop, a circular shape/amber color for stay, and a square shape/green color for go. It’s a great idea, although, we do have one suggestion.
Keeping in with the universal connotations of certain shapes, we suggest that they make the red/stop sign square-shaped, similar to how remote controls have a square sign to connotate stop. As for the yellow/stay sign, that ought to be the triangle - matter of fact, turn it upside down so its similar to the ’yield’ sign, which in essence is pretty much what the yellow light is for - and the green should remain circular because, well, triangle and square have already been accounted for.
Posted on
04.5.2011 @ 08:23
This looks like a controversial design to me. A similar traffic light to this already exists in Quebec, but they are replacing them with round ones.
"This kind of stoplight should be applied in every streets in new jersey and new york. This can be a big help to the color blind drivers."
Apply it everywhere just to help a minority. You have got me thinking. There are many poignant misconceptions about what colour "blind" people see. First of all many more are partially colour "blind" and only confuse certain colours, seeing no colour at all is very rare and achromatopia is linked with low visual acuity (below the driving test line). Partial colour-blindness is of either the red-green or blue yellow type. Most common is of the red-green type and to those of you that have heard that the red-green type is quite common, weakness to a colour is much more common than blindness. Most common is green-weakness (Deuteranomaly), and these people tend to have adequate colour vision to carry out normal colour-based tasks and not even know about their anomaly until they are tested. Thus they can make a clear distinction between colours like red, yellow and green so it is very simple for them discern traffic lights. Daltonism (red and green blindness) is much less common.