Boring Tuesdays: The current floor

This post is part of our Boring series, where one Tuesdays we sometimes post analyses on signs we did not find particularly interesting. The idea is to offset personal biases.

The sign here is an indicator for the current floor of the viewer. Located in an elevator lobby of an office building in Helsinki, it indexes its location as the "K1A" floor. It was attached very solidly to a brick wall, probably during the building's original construction. The font is clear and legible, and was repeated in other similar signs in other floors of the building.

We note that this sign was positioned at roughly eye level for adults. In many modern residential high-rise building we often see these on almost floor level; presumably the idea is that during a fire people should crawl on the floor to avoid smoke, and thus the knowledge about the current floor needs to be at a crawling level.¹