Most safety messages travel the wrong distance. From sent, to read. Not from sent, to acted on.
Today we follow one message across the floor, through the same eight steps every message takes to reach a person and change what they do. Communication is not what you send. It's what people experience, understand, and act on.
A message is about to flash on screen for a fraction of a second, the same fraction a scanner, a driver, a sorter gives it in real life. Don't read it. Just look. Then tell us what your eye actually caught. What survives the glance is what the design made unmissable, and those are the rules we'll build every artefact around.
Watch the screen, then call out the first thing you remember. Not the whole thing, the one thing.
Eight field reports came off the floor, one at a time. Some are real signals from the discovery interviews and survey. Some are plausible decoys, the kind of thing we assume is true. Call each one as a room, then flip it. Real findings stamp green and name the theme they point to.
Two sources, one story. The interviews tell us why messages miss; the survey tells us how much. Tap the themes you recognise, the more the room agrees, the bigger the mark.
A message only changes behaviour if it clears all six, in order. Miss one and it stalls. This is the language we'll use for everything that follows.
Two families of design decisions turn a message from noise into action. Flip each principle to see what it asks, then run the squint test on a real notice.
These are the repeatable moves behind every good artefact, drawn from perception, usability and behavioural science. Each one serves specific SIGNAL principles. This is the toolkit we apply on every rework.
Real AusPost-style messages, each failing one SIGNAL principle, then reworked to pass it. Same source, same audience. The dense “before” is the common failure; the honed “after” is the fix. Tap a principle to open the pair.
Every block below is one thing a message needs to clear SIGNAL. Drag a corner to size a block by how much it should dominate the artefact. Double-click (or use flip) to write how you'd do it here. Lock a block once the room agrees. When they're all locked, you have the blueprint.
The message reached the door. Now it has to change what happens next.
Name the few things Australia Post should carry into Workshop Two, the messages, formats or moments where getting SIGNAL right would matter most.
Nothing captured yet. Add the room's priorities above.