The Homeland Security safety symbols have already earned that distinction. The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) published a press release in January with the headline, "Article Highlights Confusion about Homeland Security Safety Symbols." By way of illustration it noted that the symbol intended to mean, "Use a whistle if one is available," was interpreted by participants in a study as, "Yell when you hear a whistle." HFES concluded that up to 79 percent of the symbols are "unacceptable for communicating hazard-related information."

An article published in February in The Ergonomics Report™ explores counterproductive and ineffective messaging in, "Are you communicating ergonomically?" The report also sums up the specialty field of communication ergonomics as "… the design of information in a way that fits people."

In so many words, the experts interviewed for the newspaper articles about the pyramid say it doesn’t fit people; that the image should speak to everyone, and doesn’t.

An article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found the pyramid, designed to illustrate 2005 federal dietary guidelines urging Americans to exercise more and eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, "as easy to read as the stripes on a bar code." Descriptions elsewhere include "wacky," "baffling" and "ambiguous."

Most of the experts compared the new pyramid unfavorably to the old, finding the earlier version much easier to comprehend. Released in 1992, it featured horizontal bands that decreased in thickness from the base to the top. Each differently-sized band was filled with pictures of food of a particular category, conveying what proportion of the diet should be made up of each group.

There are no pictures of food in the new pyramid – attributed in some articles to the government’s wish to be evenhanded, a line of reasoning that supposes banana growers, for example, would be angry if strawberries or apples were used to symbolize the fruit category. Inside the familiar pyramid shape, rainbow-colored bands representing different food groups run vertically from the base to the tip. Orange is for grains, green for vegetables, red for fruits, yellow for oils, blue for milk and purple for beans and meats. A figure climbing up stairs on the side prompts people to exercise. The next level of the site features the only useable information – 12 pyramids, each showing color bands proportioned to differing lifestyles and nutritional needs.

The experts also viewed delivery as a problem. The pyramid is only available for the present on the USDA website. They see poor policymaking in the assumption that all constituents have equal access to the Internet or the skills to use it. And when offline channels of communications are developed, the need to show 12 pyramids to convey useable information adds complexity to the elusive message. It also creates practical obstacles to wide dispersal: 12 symbols occupy considerable space on a label or elsewhere. Some critics noted that any message relying on color-coding is useless in a black-and-white newspaper, and is always out of reach of the color-blind.

The consensus is that the pyramid has been stripped of words, symbols and meaning. At a time of unprecedented government concern about obesity, the $2.4-million advice to eat less and exercise more is undermined by the failure to communicate ergonomically.

Sources: United States Department of Agriculture web – www.mypyramid.com, The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, The Ergonomics Report™, Associated Press, Atlanta Journal-Constitution