Part five in a Slate series on sig­nage around the world looks at the his­tory of the green “run­ning man” emer­gency exit sign and its ‘bat­tle’ with the Amer­i­can red EXIT sign.

We are told how the ISO-accepted emer­gency exit sign is Yukio Ota’s run­ning man, adopted in the late 1970s. Interesting are Ota’s thoughts on pic­tograms and their func­tion in soci­ety on dis­cov­er­ing that the two signs com­pet­ing for ISO adop­tion (his and one by a Soviet designer) were remark­ably similar:

Ota, like many design­ers of pic­tograms, is a bit of a roman­tic about the power of sym­bolic com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The first real inno­va­tor in the field was Otto Neu­rath, who devel­oped ISOTYPE, a sys­tem of pic­tograms intended to help work­ers between the world wars relate to Europe’s increas­ingly indus­trial econ­omy. […] Like Neu­rath, Ota believes that through graph­i­cal icons, we can tran­scend our cul­tural and lin­guis­tic dif­fer­ences and speak to one another as global citizens. […]

The run­ning man is thus the child of both rig­or­ous sci­ence and starry-eyed utopi­anism, and it’s now in use all over the globe.

Note: The com­plete set of 50 “passenger/pedestrian sym­bols” from the AIGI have recently been released to the pub­lic and are avail­able for free.

via @zambonini