I recently came across a post on the always interesting PSFK describing the creation of a visual coding system for London’s homeless population. These analog communications allow the homeless to relay information to one another.

Understanding the need to deliver information beyond the confines of the publication to a population with virtually no access to mobile technologies, in 2007 the Pavement enlisted the help of designer Emily Read. The end result was the development of a visual code – printed inside each issue – that anyone could use to communicate messages with their fellow community. By leaving simple, chalk symbols on the side of buildings and sidewalks, the ad hoc city guide informs a niche group of users about things like neighborhood safety, places to sleep and the availability of free food.

There’s nothing new about the homeless using symbols to pass along knowledge. How do I know this? I watch too much TV.

Read’s symbols immediately reminded me of the Mad Men episode The Hobo Code (and subsequently the comprehensive A Continuous Lean post on the actual hobo code as it existed in the US during the late 19th/early 20th century – worthwhile read to be sure).

Please note that I’m in no way trying to compare modern homelessness to the hobo/vagabond wanderers of yesteryear. That said, I think there’s a fascinating string that connects Pavement/Reed’s work with the Hobo code.

See for yourself -

Its telling how the concept of a hobo/homeless ideographic system has descended both time and space. This makes me think back to a course I took in college – Anthropology and Human Nature, in which we learned:

It is arguable that all creatures have culture, if culture is equated with environmentally acquired knowledge, or shared learning.

What distinguishes human culture from that of other creatures, and makes of culture the specialized adaptive niche of the primate Homo sapiens sapiens, is that human culture is mediated by symbols (symbol: a thing the value or meaning of which is bestowed by those who use it), that is, by language.

Symbols have made possible the creation, accumulation and transmission of infinitely greater quantities of knowledge in the species as a whole than are found in other animals.

But symbols are not reality; they constitute the labels we confer on those aspects of reality of which we become or are made aware, as well as our sense of the relationships among those aspects.

- Dr. Ackerman

This post seems to be spiraling out of control, off-topic and into the nether-regions of my mind so I will abruptly end it. The End.