Digital signs should be used to say something more than this

There are probably a number of people who visit Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris hoping for some kind of message from above, but the first thing that caught my attention when I stepped inside this past summer were the large, very much man-made digital signs declaring SILENCE PLEASE.

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to see these kinds of high-end displays within one of the world’s most famous churches. During the daytime in August, there are throngs waiting outside and hundreds of people milling inside at any given time. Yes, it’s a tourist attraction, but it’s also a sacred space, one that still functions as a place of worship. The silence is necessary to ensure it’s treated with due reverence out of respect for those who don’t merely walk through it to take photos but actually sit down before the altar and pray.

This is obviously a huge problem at Notre Dame, because there wasn’t just one digital sign asking for quiet. There were at least eight, dotted all around the nave and next to various chapels. They were also larger than the average movie poster, and hung consistently at a height well above visitors’ heads. I tried, and failed, to find an image of them online for this post, which tells me that whoever commissioned them clearly doesn’t see them as an asset to the overall aesthetic of the place. In that, I have to agree.

In fact, what’s probably most striking about the digital signage in Notre Dame is how ineffective and underutilized it is. There’s a constant hum throughout the place, even as the signs — with a black background, minimum graphics, large letters — loom ominously. It’s a great example of where more thought about content would probably help.

As DigitalSignageToday.com noted in its coverage of Scanfeed CEO Jeremy Gavin’s keynote at the Customer Engagement Technology World Show,

If the on-screen content is always the same or too repetitive, viewers will simply tune it out, the screens become visual noise and deployers will lose viewers’ attention. The need for content refreshment varies on the frequency of visits and visitors’ expected dwell time. It might be once or twice a year at a zoo that people visit only periodically, or once or twice a week at a coffee shop where people tend to be weekly or even daily visitors.

Notre Dame probably has fewer repeat visitors than the average zoo, but there are obviously only so many ways you can ask people to shut up. Instead, they might have considered a way to demonstrate the impact the chatter is having on the ambience of the cathedral and using it to reinforce the message. Imagine if the signs were outfitted with sensors, for example, that would monitor and show how noisy visitors are, as though you were looking at the levels on a stereo system:

This would create an immediate connection between the viewer and the sign, regardless of dwell time. I suspect it would also motivate them to experiment with being quieter to see the effect on the screen.

This is the difference between digital signage that falls flat than that which becomes a truly interactive display, and for Notre Dame it might bring the volume down. Canadian researchers in this space need to look for the kinds of content that not only informs or commands but that tells a real-time story about the viewer if they want to find commercial success. Otherwise what’s being broadcast on screens hasn’t got a prayer.