SIGNS OF DISCOURSE:
SITE MARKERS AS PLACES OF CULTURAL NEGOTIATION

Three salient networks of site markers delineate human navigational relationships to the terrain in the Ladakh region of the state of Jammu and Kashmir in northwestern India. The networks are: Buddhist path-marking structures; the Indian government’s Border Roads Organization (BRO) highway project signs; and non-governmental organization (NGO)-produced “Eco-Tourism Maps.” While each exhibits characteristics of wayfinding systems — locating the traveler on a particular path and providing information about what lies ahead — analysis of representational devices deployed for these systems reveals currently shifting structures of order in the region.

Situated in the Himalayas and comprising remote villages, monasteries and the central town of Leh, the region has been open to tourism and commercial trade only 30 years. With the influx of outside populations including tourists and new residents, has come a cash-based economy and an acceleration of visual culture as has been traced in Western culture since the Industrial Revolution. Sergio Correa de Jesus describes such development in the West:

“. . . the shift from the ‘environment and architecture as signs’ to ‘visual/typographic signs’ meant a disproportionate advance of a verbal form of communication in place of a more stable and permanent codification of meaning through buildings.”1

In Ladakh, the shift in prominence of communicative form alongside changing socio-economic structures is manifested in the appearance of graphic signage systems. Traditional Buddhist architectonic path-marking devices are receding into the landscape as signage elements produced in shades of cautionary yellow dot both the new major thoroughfare and backwoods trekking paths. The visual languages employed on the signs, both graphic and written, in English and Devanagari (not Ladakhi,) reflect changing roles of message producers and message consumers. With such power relationships at work, how can design respond and define a role for itself in the everyday life of a region negotiating its place in its country and the world?

In Thinking Design, Singanapalli Balaram calls on designers to pay attention and learn “by a sincere study of people’s own solutions”2 when considering contemporary design problems in India. This paper examines the roles of the networks of site markers and explores the intersections between them. I analyze the representational devices on the signage elements, their “manipulation by users who are not their makers,”3 and consider the possibilities for the role of wayfinding design in the region that meets the needs of all constituencies.

Notes
1. Sergio Correa de Jesus, “Environmental Communication: Design Planning for Wayfinding” in Design       Issues, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn 1994), 32-51.
2. Singanapalli Balaram, Thinking Design (Delhi: National Institute of Design, 1998) 79.
3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: The Unviersity of California Press, 1988) xiii