Signs of Inappropriate Appropriation

In general, I’m a huge fan of recombination, bricolage, and getting inspiration from other designs and other domains. It can be a great way to reframe your problem or the design you are working on. By coming at the problem from a new perspective, you may be inspired to develop a novel solution, but sometimes its just not appropriate.

Often times the direct appropriation of a solution doesn’t work as well in a new domain. This crisis of mis-appropriation is compounded when the designer is borrowing a visual language or other superficial token of the design, as opposed to borrowing an underlying insight or concept. The situation is even worse when the visual language being appropriated is well established within the cultural psyche and can’t be easily separated from the original values and histories of the original object. Sometimes designers want to play with these cultural stories and purposefully invoke their meaning, but sometimes they just shouldn’t.

On a recent train ride in Michigan, I came across an advertisement that made to do a double take. In the informational booklet there were the usual advertisements for local businesses. As I was aimlessly flipping through the booklet, I did a double take when I saw the advertisement for “State Road Urgent Care”

I really had to read the words of the ad to figure out what it is an ad for. At first I thought is was an ad for a diner or some other sort of restaurant, but I was way off. I would never have guessed that his is an ad for an urgent care facility without reading the words. The visual language used in this ad is pretty far from any standard visual language used in the healthcare industry. Worse yet, the designer has appropriated a fairly distinct visual language with

Can you see it? I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t tell exactly where the designer had appropriated the visual language. It was strong enough that it was familiar, but I couldn’t exactly place it.

I searched for images of diner signs and motel signs. It even reminded me a little of the the Pensacola Beach sign. These types of signs contained some of the elements I was looking for, but something didn’t feel right.

After searching a second time I stumbled across the following image while looking at more motel signs.

Yup. That’s it. The “Urgent Care” sign is almost a straight replica for the welcome to Las Vegas sign. Wow. There’s a lot going on here, and I’m not sure where to begin. Intentional or not, why in the world would you want to associate your urgent care facility with stereotypical values of Las Vegas? Did the tag line, “Let’s gamble on your health” get cut from the sign.