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The Soviets complained that Ota’s design (left) had no door; the Japanese delegation complained that the vertical line between the door and the doorframe in the Soviet design (right) made it more difficult to recognize the figure of the runner.
For Ota, the most remarkable thing was not that his design won but how similar his design was to the Soviets’. They, too, had submitted a figure of a man running out a door. He was amazed that two design teams, working independently, would develop such similar concepts, and the coincidence convinced him of the essential rightness of the running man. He came to believe he had designed not just Yukio Ota’s exit sign, not just a Japanese exit sign, but a fundamentally human exit sign, one that speaks to some primal cognitive notion of escape.
