Tuesday, July 7, 2026
A design trap at the playground
A design trap is when you start off with what seems like a good idea, then cling to it even when it obviously isn’t working.
It appears that happened with this sign. I have obscured the name of the local body that made it because they had good intentions.
The sign prohibits four things:
- Smoking
- Alcohol
- Drugs
- Loitering
For smoking, they used the internationally recognized symbol of a circle with a slash through it and a cigarette in the middle.
So far, so good. So good, in fact, that it seemed like the perfect way to express other bans. Unfortunately, it was the beginning of a slippery slope.
For alcohol, things got tricky because alcohol mainly comes in bottles and cans, which in pictogram form would not necessarily be recognized as containing alcohol.
So they chose a martini glass, complete with olive. Outside of James Bond movies, I’m pretty sure I have never seen a martini glass. Maybe I need to get out more. Still, the thought of miscreants sipping martinis on a playground seems silly.
They were forced to use the martini glass, though, because they were in a design trap. They needed something to go inside a slash-circle and a martini glass was all they could find that unambiguously says “alcohol.”
Then came drugs, which are even trickier. A syringe might have been a good choice, but a syringe is not always used for illicit drugs. The same holds true for pills. A marijuana cigarette would have looked too much like a tobacco cigarette.
So they settled on the word “DRUGS”. But making matters worse, they had to place the word on top of the slash because otherwise it would have obscured the letters. We know what they meant, but technically an item is not banned unless the slash goes through it.
Finally we get to “No Loitering.” This is the point where they should have had an “aha” moment. The words tell you everything you need to know, simple and direct.
This is the moment when they should have broken out of the design trap, and realized they had a simple solution. All they had to do was use their words: no smoking, no alcohol, no drugs, no loitering.
To be fair, they likely got their slash-circle ideas from the internet, where a similar design trap is apparent. If you do an image search on “no alcohol”, you’ll find martini glasses, wine glasses, wine bottles, and more. A search on “no drugs” reveals a similar hodge-podge.
The representations of “no loitering” are especially weird. What exactly are those stick figures supposed to be doing?
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