Leading the way with Wayfinding

Wayfinding has been defined as all of the ways in which people and animals orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place. The term might have been coined by urban planner, Kevin A. Lynch for his book Image of the City (1960), however the real part that interest me has to be Waysigning. My term for the signs & symbols that guide us to find our way. This art has been perfected by some amazing Waysigners. Companies like Mijksenaar really excel at getting into the human psyche and figuring out how we find our way.

In my mind though Wayfinding is not only limited to navigating places, but also instructions for objects. Here are some examples of instructional design by Paul Mijksenaar. Getting into the Synoptic and Discrete Sequences is a whole different topic for future discussion.

Here are some of my own shots of the excellent Waysigning that has been implemented in the British Museum. I think the reason I love this so much is because it goes hand-in-hand with another design discipline that I find fascinating, ‘Museum Design’.

After writing this post, I drove past the new Greenpoint Stadium in Cape Town, which truly is an architectural marvel. The stadium is very minimalist, and the Waysigning has been done in a similar way. I am not convinced that their choices of colour etc are necessarily the most impactful, as many of the signs simply get lost. If they followed the theory in  Architectural Signing and Graphics, Follis & Hammer 1979, they would have known that their black signs would have to be 225% the size of the same sign in white to be as conspicuous. In other words, Yellow signs would have been much better at the small sizes.

Wayfinding – Part science, part art, and just a little magic.
Francois Botha, 2010