Wayfinding

My team decided to base our project around the event of attempting to navigate through the Burge Union on campus and trying to find the Career Center. One of our group members, Halie Hershorn, explained to us that once she had to go there in order to research some internships, but once she got to the Burge Union, it was very difficult for her to find the correct room, even though it was not far away, due to a lack of helpful signage and resources. Our goal is to find an easier way to navigate the building so that anyone visiting for the first time will have no trouble finding what they are looking for.

Wayfinding Project

Wayfinding encompasses the information-gathering and decision-making processes people use to orient themselves and navigate through space; simply put, how people get from one location to another.

Kevin Lynch in his book The Image of the City (1960), coined the term “wayfinding” to describe his concept of environmental legibility. He identified the skeletal elements of city form:

· Paths: Familiar routes followed such as streets, walkways, subway routes.

· Edges: boundaries between two phases, linear breaks in continuity.  The physical barriers of walls, fences, rivers, or shorelines.

· Districts: areas with perceived internal homogeneity such as midtown, residential areas, industrial areas, suburbs, college campuses etc.

· Nodes: centers of attraction that you can enter. Major intersection or meeting places, such as New York’s Grand Central Terminal

· Landmarks: point of reference such as building, sign, store, or mountain.

With this project, our group is supposed to think of an experience on campus that can be solved by using a better thought out wayfinding procedure. We have to try to pull ourselves away from the experience and put ourselves in the position of the individual trying this for the first time, seeing what obstacles or difficulties arise, and appropriate tools we could implement in order to make the experience as easy as possible for the individual. Everything from signage, to maps, to individuals used to help people succeed in finding their way.