There are many ways that the Bucknell administration tries to disperse news about campus throughout the student body. From the overwhelming/long/late-night Bucknell Message Center Digest messages that get sent directly to my spam folder, to the real-life Bucknellian news papers that I never seem to pick up, there are mostly a great number of easily- ignorable ways that Bucknell students receive information.
However, the bathroom news installments stand out among the rest as a particularly good design for news announcements in my mind. Though at first the idea of a news announcement on the bathroom stall seemed silly to me during my first-year, it was the silliness of the idea that captured and kept mine and my friend’s attention. We would joke about the very existence of these signs and the student tips that we would read on them.
Along with the attention-capturing fact of having news delivered to you in the bathroom at all, these installments are also effective because they are ideally placed. They are installed on the inside of the stalls at eye level with anyone who might be sitting on a toilet. If we consider the simple fact that many people read/do mindless tasks while on the toilet, and that these news installments are easily noticeable/accessible to students who are most probably not doing anything else at the time that they notice these posts, then the brilliance behind the placement and implementation of these signs becomes clear.
I will shamelessly admit that I have read more of these bathroom signs than any of the Bucknell Message Center Digest emails that I have received every night for the past three years. And the reason, simply put, is that they’re well designed!