We came across this article in Health Facilities Digital Management Magazine which is quite interesting as it is what we do in ID/Lab. Looking at possible patient flows, before a building like a hospital is being build.

By observing how a patient flows through a hospital, architects can design a modern health care environment that eliminates wasted time, reduces operational costs and ultimately leads to less mistakes, back-flows and waiting. The key is to understand the current process flows prior to design, analyze these flows and create the ideal future state flows, adjacencies and spaces that provide the best functionality for each process, department or organization.

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This placemaking article is about Harvard Uni in the US. Harvard Uni have engaged PPS to achieve a place of sense that’s both attractive  and active for students and other stakeholders.

Last year ID/Lab developed a user experience audit for Waurn Ponds Deakin Uni in Geelong, Vic, while we also interviewed stakeholders.

Staff felt that more could be done to minimise the amount of direction giving around campus. A practical approach was needed:

Signage needed to be revamped, including the campus map and certain pathways needed to be more dominant. The carpark addressing system had to be simplified, including improving the pre-visit info and message hierarchy.

Such changes all add to achieving a place of sense and attraction, especially for new students, as nothing is so frustrating as feeling lost.

Wayfinding part 1

wayfinding part 2

wayfinding part 3

wayfinding part 4

By Yvonne Verheem

Healthcare Design Magazine in the USA quoted some of the work ID/Lab performed for the “Specialist Clinics Wayfinding Guidelines, The Outpatient Journey”, for the Department of Human Services Victoria. It was a joint project with Growth Solutions in Melbourne.

The article on the web/blog talks about wayfinding in healthcare facilities.

www.healthcaredesignmagazine.com

We have moved!

On 1 October ID/Lab moved to its new premises in the Docklands area. You can find us now in the Life.Lab building, on the corner Latrobe Street and Harbour Esplanade. It’s next to the Port 1010 building and only minutes away from the Etihad Stadium and Southern Cross train station. But more importantly: It’s close to most of our customers in the CBD. We are excited about our new spot! It means our customers can drop-in at our office more easily and vice versa. And we have a better excuse to go ‘for coffee’!

Our new address is: 402A /198 Harbour Esplanade, Docklands, VIC 3008.

Our phone number stays the same: 03 8682 9813

The Life.Lab building has been designed by award winning architects Moull Murray creating an impressive visual statement in Docklands, Melbourne.

Its location on Harbour Esplanade with direct views to Victoria Harbour gives the building a prime waterfront location, with public transport at the front door, the building will help us project an image of ‘business on the move’. The internal areas create a vibrant community where we can use the latest technology, including state of the art meeting rooms and presentation facilities.

The following contribution is from Jonathan Rez. He is a Senior Wayfinding Strategist at FW Design in London. With cross-disciplinary design background, he has been working across physical and online environments. He is also a casual lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Australia where he wrote the course Visual Identity in the Built Environment.

Thingfinding is a new way to think about how we navigate and experience contemporary urban life.

Traditional physical information systems in the built environment provide an effective way to wayfinding, however in their current format, they do not satisfy our need to find something specific that exists within a place.

Typically, people are not looking for a destination solely for the purpose of arriving there. In most occasions, we are interested in something that exists in that destination, be it a product, a service, an experience, a person or a particular state of mind. Unfortunately, traditional wayshowing systems are not able to provide us with that level of personalised information and we have to rely on a two stage process of thingfinding. That is, first, identify where the thing can be found, and then find the way to it. Up until recently, this would most likely have occurred using the Yellow Pages or a search engine, followed by a physical on-street wayshowing system. More recently, newly available technology is providing a streamlined thingfinding process via location aware smart phones.

At the most basic level, I can use my smart phone for wayfinding, with the help of the in-built GPS and Map application. The phone locates where I am and charts a path to my desired destination, indicating to me where I am up to along my journey to assist in orientation and navigation.
At a more advanced level, I can use my smart phone for thingfinding. For example if I’m feeling like Sushi for lunch, I can search for it using the map application which shows me where I might find Sushi nearby, and subsequently show me the way there.

The rate at which new thingfinding technologies are advancing is swift and consequently 2009 marks a dramatic shift in the way many of us experience and interact with the world around us. The proliferation of location aware smart phones with uninterrupted mobile web connection and more affordable data plans has created a fertile ground for the growth in location based services, particularly location based social networking platforms. Together these enable us to consume and create rich locative media; information, images and other location specific content as well as new social forms of interaction, essentially ascribing new meaning to a place.

More interesting interactions begin to occur using location based social networks, such as Dopplr, Plazes and Brightkite to name just a few. For example, as a tourist or traveller arriving at a new place, I no longer have to look for a tourist information centre to find out what interesting sites, amenities and other things exist around me, as long as I have a Dopplr account. Recently redefining itself as ‘The Social Atlas’ Dopplr lets me map my own journeys and add geo-tagged information about my experiences along the way. I am also able to access information about other people’s experiences, both strangers and friends. By scheduling a trip to Greenwich, I am automatically presented with local information contributed by other travellers, about their experiences of the place. I can read what other people think about a set of questions presented by Dopplr:
Where’s good to eat in Greenwich
Where can I get free internet connection
What’s good to explore in Greenwich
What’s the best local market or shopping
What’s nearby that’s worth a visit
Where’s a good place to stay
Tell us something good about London.

Plazes, which was established in 2004 and was last year purchased by Nokia, offers a number of different ways to find information about places. The ‘Radar’ lets me drag a pin and place it in a desired location on a map to explore people and ‘plazes’ in the area.

Alternatively, I can filter the type of information in which I am interested using a category drop-down menu.

In the list of destinations presented to me I recognise the café I visited yesterday. I enjoyed my experience there, and since my experience of Cafés in London is generally poor, I made sure to ‘plaze’ myself at the place and share it with my contacts. The café was ‘plazed’ by another person and since it is quite a quirky café, perhaps this person and me share a common taste. I click their profile to see what other ‘plazes’ they visited, hoping to find insights about other local places.
New connections are created within location based social networks when strangers share similar interests as well as when they share an interest in similar places.

Tens of location based applications or contextual location services that collect human contributed information about things in places contribute towards a huge repository of location specific information. Even older more established online services now incorporate location-based information. Flickr, for example, now enables users to geotag photos.

Having at our fingertips locative media in the form of text, images, and in the near future moving image and sonic segments that convey people’s in-place experiences helps us better understand places. At the same time, the way we experience places is being redefined. More than ever before we can experience places without physically being in them. Furthermore, having the ability to share our in-place experiences means that as individuals we play an active role in shaping the way others experience places.

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By Yvonne Verheem

Most designers and architects believe wayfinding is not a high priority issue, or view it as a problem that will interfere with good design. And too often it is considered simply a signage issue….

According to Professor Per Mollerup, “Wayfinding should be part of the logistics and general site planning, especially for complex sites like hospitals, otherwise, wayfinding could become so-called repair design for architectural neglect”.

ID/Lab’s research project for the Austin/Mercy Hospital in Melbourne revealed that the hospital was spending over $2.2 million annually in staff time giving directions. This does not yet address the cost for missed appointments!

After implementing just the most urgent of ID/Lab’s recommendations,  70% less wayfinding complaints were received and the hospital saved over $650,000.00 annually in staff time. All the recommended changes could have been picked up in the architectural design stages, and be implemented as part of the building work for minimum cost.

Wayfinding is more then just a navigational aid. Rather it is a way to market an area’s resources (eg retail, tourist attractions), alter negative perceptions, evoke a sense of character and improve accessibility and public safety.

ID/Lab is Australia’s only specialised wayshowing consultancy. We have developed a unique approach to delivering wayshowing/wayfinding solutions, based on many years of experience researching, developing, designing, testing and implementing wayshowing strategies in Australia and Europe.

PPS (Project for Public Places) is a nonprofit US organisation helping people turn their public spaces into vital community places. They have been focusing on squares for the last 30 years and developed 10 principles to create successful squares, based on analysis and observations of hundreds of them. They found that design is actually just a small fraction of what makes squares stand out. It’s a heap of others factors that extend beyond its physical dimensions that make it succeed.

Those 10 principles are:

1. Image and Identity

2. Attractions and Destinations

3. Amenities

4. Flexible Design

5. Seasonal Strategy

6. Access

7. The Inner Square & the Outer Square

8. Reaching Out Like an Octopus

9. The Central Role of Management

10. Diverse Funding Sources

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