Archives for posts with tag: wayfinding

Wayfinding – More Than Just Signs

June 25, 2012 //
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Most churches do a pretty lousy job at wayfinding. Because many churches are built as add-ons over time, sometimes many years, buildings tend to be mazes of corridors and stairwells with little rhyme or reason. Many churches suffer from poor layout, people-traffic control, and wayfinding.

Wayfinding is the process of using spatial and environmental cues to navigate through an environment. In its most literal sense, wayfinding is the ability of a person to find his or her way to a destination. It can also be defined from the standpoint of the designer or owner who is seeking to improve the function of a particular environment.

Wayfinding is not separate from traditional signage design, but is a broader, more inclusive way of assessing all of the environmental issues that affect our ability to find our way to a given destination.

A comprehensive wayfinding system can greatly improve your congregation’s ability to not only find areas of the church campus they are seeking, but to direct guests and others to these areas as well. A clear wayfinding system can add to the accessibility and friendliness of the church buildings. Here are a few tips on wayfinding:

  • Focus people on buildings by labeling them
  • Avoid long directional signs that slow people down
  • Divide the campus into distinct zones
  • Use color and monuments to create bread-crumbs
  • Make room numbers make sense
  • Develop a simple campus map

A church of even moderate size should address basic wayfinding…

After all, how can anyone really connect with your church if they can’t find the front door?

More information about wayfinding:

Where is Your Red X?
Wayfinding 101
The Wayfinding Design Process
Wayfinding Planning and Strategy
Sign Language
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Categories Design, Guest Services

Sign Language

March 23, 2012 //
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A wayfinding system links different people together, even if they do not share a common language or destination, by guiding all of them through the same spaces with a single system of communication. The unifying language of a wayfinding system creates a public narrative of how people witness, read, and experience a space. Each sign in a system, each separate voice, serves a particular function and displays a specific kind of content called a message, which might include nonverbal graphic symbols, images, or words.

- David Gibson, The Wayfinding Handbook

Most wayfinding systems can be broken down into several categories of signs: identification, directional, orientation, and regulatory.

EXTERIOR

Identification - the building blocks of wayfinding

  • Site monument identification
  • Site entry identification
  • Building mounted identification
  • Entrance identification
  • Parking area identification
  • Accessible parking identification

Directional – the circulatory system of wayfinding

  • Off-site trailblazers
  • On-site vehicular directional signs
  • Pedestrian directional signs

Regulatory – describes the do’s and don’ts of a place

  • Parking regulations
  • Entrance information

INTERIOR

Identification

  • Store identification
  • Area/level identification
  • Public amenity identification
  • Service and maintenance identification
  • Office identification
  • Elevator and stair identification

Directional

  • Directional signs

Orientation – provides an overview of surroundings

  • Building directory
  • Elevator/floor directory

Regulatory

  • Fire egress maps
  • Life safety signs

The sign narrative is the voice of the building and its owner, revealing the pathways and destinations of the building or space, the rules that govern how to use it, and essential information about activities happening within. It is the job of the wayfinding designer to weave these voices together into a single eloquent statement as people navigate the space.

Wayfinding systems serve living environments where functions for areas change, spaces are renovated, and new facilities are constructed. Wayfinding systems must be flexible and adapt to the evolution of a place.

Information from this series of post this week has come from The Wayfinding Handbook by David Gibson. A concise and engaging work, it is an excellent resource for leaders wanting to apply the art and science of wayfinding to their organization. The extensive illustrations, using real-life examples, provide a visual analysis of the fundamentals that lead to great wayfinding design.

You may not think of yourself as a designer; you would be wrong.

Wayfinding design is an intuitive process we use all the time, one that helps us navigate the places and spaces we encounter every day. Leaders may not design a wayfinding system, but it is a process that they need to have a firm grasp on.

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Categories Design

Wayfinding Planning and Strategy

March 22, 2012 //
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The job of the wayfinding designer is to present information in public spaces that helps facilitate a seamless guest experience.

 - David Gibson, The Wayfinding Handbook

When people attempt to navigate a place for the first time, they face a series of decisions as they follow a path to their destination. There is a sequential pattern to this wayfinding process – in effect, a series of questions that people ask themselves along the way. Before starting the design process, the wayfinding consultant must anticipate guest patterns, understand that logic, and apply it in the planning phase. Then work can begin on a framework for the wayfinding design program.

Imagine you are a guest looking for a museum in the cultural district of a large city where many buildings have the same architectural style and look alike. You approach one, feeling a mixture of hesitance and excitement: Am I going in the right direction? Is the museum I want to visit? If there is no clear entrance marked, are you going in the right door? And once inside, How do you find the exhibit you are looking for?

At each stage in this sequence, the guest must make decisions based on the available, and readily visible, information. The job of the wayfinding designer is to present information in public spaces that helps facilitate a seamless guest experience. in other words, the necessary sequence of movement should feel as effortless and simplified as possible so that ten steps seem to require only two or three.

The designer’s challenge is to determine where to locate signs, what they shoud say, and how they should say it. Thoughtful research and analysis help the designer understand a complex public place, such as a hospital or a campus or a subway system. In the process of tracing the guest’s path, the designer attempt to uncover the hidden logic of the place. Once that is clear, the designer can develop a strategic framework for the wayfinding system.

NEWS FLASH: All of the above statements are also true in ChurchWorld.

When Guests come to your facilities, do they know how to drive into the parking lots? Do they know which building they are going to? Do they know which door to enter? Can they easily determine where they need to go once they step inside the building?

ChurchWorld leaders must think like wayfinding designers in order to help Guests and members have a seamless guest experience while on your campus. Nothing less than excellence should be the goal.

Tomorrow: Sign Language

Information for this series of posts comes primarily from The Wayfinding Handbook by David Gibson. It is an excellent resource for leaders who want to apply the art and science of wayfinding to their organizations.

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Categories Design

The Wayfinding Design Process

March 21, 2012 //
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There are predictable steps that define the process of wayfinding design. Understanding this procedure helps the designer – and the client – succeed.

The process chart listed below provides a general template for how most wayfinding projects proceed once a design firm is chosen. Keep in mind that for smaller projects some of the phases are sometimes combined or eliminated.

PLANNING

  • Research and Analysis - understanding the operational requirements and other demands the wayfinding system must address. This phase includes reviewing architectural plans and analyzing anticipated circulation patterns; identifying exterior vehicular and pedestrian traffic flows and interior pedestrian patterns. These patterns and needs become the basis for the problem to be solved. Deliverables include the project schedule, research report and site observations, and the problem statement.
  • Strategy - the functional framework for the system, explaining how it will provide information and directions for a place and how it will address user requirements. This phase includes developing an outline of the types of signs that will be needed and the design goals for the signage system. A clear and effective strategy provides the basis for successful signage. Deliverables include the wayfinding strategy, design goals, and an outline of each sign type.
  • Programming - with the strategy established and circulation paths anticipated, critical decision points and other key locations requiring signage are established. A database is developed which includes location and sign text. This database is then used to calculate and budget preliminary sign fabrication costs. Deliverables include draft sign location plans, draft sign message schedules, and preliminary sign fabrication budget.

DESIGN

  • Schematic Design - establishing the design vocabulary and approving design direction. This phase includes selecting key sign types and design alternatives; varying the forms, materials, palettes, color, typography and content; and identity and branding design. Deliverables include identity or branding design recommendations and an approved approach to the selected design vocabulary using selected sign types.
  • Design Development – developing the approved schematic design scheme to resolve details of typography, color, materials, finishes, and mounting for the wayfinding program. This phase includes finalizing designs for each sigh type; coordinating with the architect and engineer about power requirements, structural issues, and architectural integration; and finalizing the sign fabrication budget. Deliverables include full development of details of all sign types and a refined fabrication budget estimate.
  • Construction Documentation - creating the design intent drawings for all of the approved sign types. This phase includes the creation of final sign layouts, elevations, and fabrication details; written sign specifications describing the design intent standards; and final sign location plans and message schedules. Deliverables include design intent documents; final sign location plan, final sign message schedule, and sign specifications.

IMPLEMENTATION

  • Bid Support - providing clarification of the design intent documents as needed through the bidding process. This phase includes identifying qualified sign fabricators; holding a prebid meeting to explain the project; and assisting the client with the evaluation and selection of a bidder based on qualifications and price quotation. Deliverables include a bidders list and review services.
  • Construction Administration – providing supervisory assistance to the client. This phase includes reviewing fabricator submissions; site visits to the fabricator’s workshop to review materials, colors, samples, etc.; providing supervisory assistance during installation, and inspection of final installation. Deliverables include clarification sketches, review services, and the punch list.

If you have ever participated in a building project, the steps listed above should sound familiar to you. They are the same as the overall building process. In effect, the wayfinding project is a microcosm of the entire building project, and should be treated with the same attention to detail, planning, supervision, and follow-up.

Function is fine but designers as the artist of our system must, as it were, provide the spice as well as the nutrition.

 - Alan Fletcher

Tomorrow: Planning and Strategy

Information for this series of posts comes primarily from The Wayfinding Handbook by David Gibson. It is an excellent resource for leaders who want to apply the art and science of wayfinding in their organizations.

 

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Categories Design

Wayfinding 101

March 20, 2012 //
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Wayfinding design provides guidance and the means to help people feel at ease in their surroundings.

- David Gibson, The Wayfinding Handbook

Going to the hospital – as a patient, family member, or even just to visit someone – is almost always guaranteed to make you uneasy when it comes to finding your way to your destination. Hospitals are typically complex, multilevel facilities – often built over a span of decades, which means they may have multiple entrances, building styles, and floor levels.

How do you help people find their way in a hospital – or in any other place – or in YOUR place?

People throughout history have gravitated to town centers, market squares, and public places to buy and sell products. Houses of worship, once set apart as a literal sanctuary from the fray, now sit side by side with busy commercial centers, libraries, schools, restaurants, and residential complexes.

Over time, cities, spaces, complexes and buildings fill up with information, markers, and symbols. Sometimes the results are helpful, but the effect can also be ugly or chaotic, or both. The challenge is to enhance a space – public, commercial, or private – by finding order in chaos without destroying character.

Enter wayfinding.

Great wayfinding systems employ explicit signs and information as well as implicit symbols and landmarks that together communicate with accuracy and immediacy. Over the last thirty years, wayfinding design has matured to become an essential component of buildings and spaces, helping make sense of a sometimes overwhelming task: getting from here to there.

What do wayfinding clients need?

The examples below illustrate the range of design projects. The complexity of the project grows in direct proportion to the scale and challenges of the client’s property.

  • Individual sign – a single landmark or feature sign
  • Wayfinding for building complexes – exterior and interior signage for a group of buildings
  • System signage – signage for multiple locations, branches, or franchises operated by one owner or manager, ranging from park systems to consumer banks
  • Open space signage – exterior signage for individual parks, streets, or plazas; for trails and greenways; for urban downtowns
  • Campus wayfinding – wayfinding system for a group of buildings operating together on one site
  • Building signage – signage for an individual structure, exterior and/or interior

Successful wayfinding design depends on understanding three variables:

  1. The nature of the client organization
  2. The people with whom the organization communicates
  3. The type of environment in which the system is installed

Wayfinding in ChurchWorld

As a leader in ChurchWorld, you may be saying, “This is all well and good, but we’re not even meeting our budget or having enough volunteers to serve in our ministries, or …”

People will always need to know where they are, how to reach their destination, what is happening there, and how to exit.

Of all places, shouldn’t the church be clear about wayfinding?

Tomorrow: The Wayfinding Design Process

Information for this series comes primarily from The Wayfinding Handbook by David Gibson. It is an excellent resource for leaders who want to understand and apply the art and science of wayfinding to their organization.

 

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Categories Design

Where is your Red X?

March 19, 2012 //
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In this case, literally.

The one that says “You Are Here.”

Exciting the subway in the middle of a city or stepping off the elevator onto a strange floor is momentarily disorienting: you scan the space to figure out where you are and find clues that will lead you where you want to go. This scanning is similar to searching for an article in a magazine or perusing the home page of a website to figure out how it is organized and how to read a specific section.

All these reflex actions are about wayfinding.

 - Christopher Pullman, design consultant and senior critic at Yale University School of Art

Wayfinding pays a very important part in ChurchWorld – from the design of your website to the design of your graphic pieces to the design of your building (notice the common word – design.) If you are a ChurchWorld leader and don’t think you are or need to be a designer, I invite you to join me in a conversation that started here.

People will always need to know where they are, how to reach their destination, what is happening there, and how to exit.

Increasingly, my consultations with clients include the issue of wayfinding – most of the time in a physical sense of the spaces they are using, renovating, or preparing to build. Sometimes, it’s just a dreaming conversation, but even that is a great place to start!

This week, I want to dive into the topic of wayfinding in ChurchWorld – I hope you will enjoy the journey!

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Categories Design
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