You can’t compare a small, flat country like the Netherlands with a huge country like Australia, however many Australian cities have flat areas that are perfect for cycling. There are also plenty of Australians who live within cycling distance from work. People could ride instead of driving to work, and this would lessen some of the ever-increasing peak-hour traffic jams in our major cities. In my opinion, one solution to this would be creating a safe thoroughfare for bicycles on their way to and from work.

Although Melbourne is known for its cycle paths, there are many poor or broken connections and paths, and some even come to a complete stop at busy intersections, where protection from traffic is most needed. Once you have crossed the intersection without being run off the road, the bicycle path picks up again. Quite frankly, I still don’t understand the ‘safety’ principles behind this decision…

Hopefully the video inspires people to do something about the situation here in Melbourne!

The project  has just started in earnest now, with the first meeting with the architects out of the way and several user group meetings lined up.

Works on the VCCC facilities are expected to be completed by the end of 2015, ready for service delivery in early 2016.

ID/Lab has been contracted to take care of the wayfinding strategy and the signage design.

Not only did we work on a number of interesting wayfinding projects (Melbourne Arts Centre, Stockland’s Selandra Rise, Melbourne Airport, Royal Adelaide Hospital, Liverpool Hospital, Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre (VCCC), Bank of New Zealand and a few Canadian Hospitals to mention a few), we’ve also moved our Melbourne office and opened two offices overseas—one in Canada and one in the USA. 

We’ve changed our corporate identity and designed our new blog and website www.idlab.com.au  

And we still had time to develop a handy guide to the Xmas holidays for our blog readers! 

We wish you all the best for the New Year—have fun-filled and safe holidays!

Then between 1955-1960 the invasion of the motorcar started. Urban town planners started making room for motorised traffic, making the cars happy and people were treated as arbitrary. The urban scene changed from a 5 km p/hr zone to a 60 km p/hr zone.

Architecture started to change and the urban face transformed to large spaces, huge signals, no details and no more focus on people!

Another shift took place in the sixties where the city limits started expanding and rapid growth took priority. The people scaled city transformed into a city planned one and from there into a site planned city.

No one was looking at eye level scale anymore and this hasn’t much changed in the last 50 years. Then another phenomenon took place, the Brasilia Syndrome: City planning from an aerial view. Looks great from the sky but not so at people scale which gets completely neglected. Jan used the term bird shit architecture and took Dubai as example…

Architects enjoyed the freestanding form but it was not designed for people scale at all. People often feel lost in such an environment. People like to spend time in a human scale environment. It seems the architects got their scale confused as interaction between form & life has been mostly ignored. People who are put in design examples by Architects always seems to be very happy and content with their surroundings, but are they? A good public realm is very important. People scaled cities provide protection, comfort and enjoyment. People shape the city/buildings and then they shape us.

Some solutions to create great urban spaces are to scale down our cities, create aesthetic quality and positive experiences like possibilities for walking and sitting, protection from wind and draft, noise, protection of crime & traffic accidents by creating street life and areas free from cars. At ID/Lab we use similar paradigms on the urban projects we are working on.

At the moment we are involved with a couple of residential developers who want to encourage their clients to walk and cycle more on the new estate; what can we add/remove in the urban fabric to make this happen?

Our recommendations included changes to the architecture, some of the fit-out elements and staff behaviour. The project was a great example of the importance of testing design assumptions early in the process, preferable by specialists like ourselves…..

Once we have finalised the project, we will ask permission from the bank to show you what exactly we have done there. Stay tuned.

To be precise, space syntax is a theory which examines how the arrangement of the built environment impacts the ability to understand it.

As wayfinders, this information is very useful to us as it can help us determine locations for signage or other elements of wayfinding strategies, such as landmarks.

For his presentation to the team, Philip showed some analyses of Cabrini Hospital, one of the sites which ID/Lab is currently working on. These were created with the Depthmap application, which produces a range of graphical analyses from DXF files (exported from SketchUp). These analyses may be useful to demonstrate to our clients the movement behaviours within their sites or buildings and how these inform our strategy decisions.

There is a simple explanation of space syntax in chapter 8 of Colin Ellard’s book ‘You Are Here’.

More information about space syntax and the Depthmap application can be found at:

http://www.spacesyntax.com/index.html
http://www.vr.ucl.ac.uk/depthmap/

“………..Speaking of good maps, Michel Verheem is something of an expert. Since 2006, he has been running ID/Lab, a specialist wayfinding company that focuses on creating legible environments instead of just legible signs. “I am not a designer,” he insists. “For us, the first thing is that a sign needs to work and then we’ll make it pretty. We’ll quite happily make something really ugly that works really well, where most designers focus on beauty.”

For Verheem, the beauty is in the legibility and usability.  “We really focus on the science of how people navigate, how they behave when they navigate, what needs to be changed or added to an environment to make their behaviour fit organisational requirements.”

Considering Verheem is an expert on wayfinding, he should be a great person to ask about the idea of a visually overloaded existence and if he thinks textual signs risk overtaking the more stable architectural intentions of many built environments. “One of the major problems is that too much information is being put into our space,” says Verheem. “The comparison can be if you buy a new piece of equipment with a 500-page manual with no index, you’ll eventually get through it and work the machine if you are extremely smart and patient. But if you get a 25-page manual with highlights, then you’ll be working that machine in half an hour. You can apply that idea to the visual pollution of an urban space or an airport or a hospital. If the information you provide is not specific to the problem you want to solve as a navigator, then it is pollution.”

So what does he think should be done to clean up the pollution? Well, he doesn’t profess to have all the solutions, but one simple step in the right direction would be to get rid of some of those pesky ‘keep left’ signs. Until Verheem explains this to me, I’ve never really thought about how pointless and borderline dangerous ‘keep left’ signs really are.  “Why do I have to have a sign every two and a half kilometres, which says ‘stay to the left unless overtaking’?” he asks. “You could presume that if I have a driver’s licence, then I know to stick to the left. The rest of that information then becomes a waste of space. It is something that I as a driver have to focus on, read, process then decide that I already know it. It’s not going to change our behaviour in any way.” Amen to that………”

We collaborated with Lend Lease and Rice Daubney on creating a wayfinding system that would work for English speaking and non-English speaking clients.

To achieve this we implemented what we call the “Airport Gate System”, where destinations are given a numeral code. Numeric coding makes it possible to ‘name’ destinations sequentially; destination 112, is likely to be near 111 and 113.

Standard hospital wayfinding uses long, difficult to read, speak and understand medical terminology. In Liverpool, visitors can be told that  the  otolaryngologist (just try pronouncing or remembering this……) is on level 1, Reception 118. Easy to remember, easy to write down. The wayfinding signage now does not need long lists of similar looking words, but just shows groups of numbers: 101 – 112 to the right, 113-124 to the left. This type of instruction can be read and understood by large groups of people, even people with limited English proficiency or reading difficulties.

We will update this post with photos as soon as we’ve got them.

In 2008, we worked on the development of the wayfinding strategy for this  Silver Thomas Hanley and Hassell designed hospital. This project included a very interesting Terminology & Pictogram Comprehension research component.

The results were great, and it is good to see the project being awarded the “NSW MBA Award for the Best Health Building project $50m -$150m”.

The only way for the self to survive is by severing these connections—adopting a blasé attitude to the individuals we meet.

But what if the same idea applies to wayfinding systems? If people become overwhelmed by information, they simply cease to receive anything new until they have processed the first batch. The metropolis has a tendency to overload people with signs, be they advertisements, directional information or simple place-marking—much as it is populated with people, it must also be populated with information for those people.

View of Times Square signage
Excessive signage means that little information can be absorbed.

By forcing people to switch off their information processing, this excess signage may actually be training people to ignore signed information in other contexts. People generally know to rely on wayshowing systems in information critical environments—while driving, at hospitals, etc. The challenge becomes getting people to pay attention to non-critical information.

[For those playing the home game, have a look at this fantastic article on a forgotten piece of Times Square signage.]

This is the sort of thing that advertisers have dealt with for a long time, and explains why so much of advertising is an attempt to grab attention. Witness the rise of Flash advertisements to understand how this phenomenon works—it starts as a simple text ad, gains animation, and then suddenly its full live-action video with voice and music. And so we learn to ignore yet one more thing in our daily lives. This is how the blasé attitude becomes commonplace.

If users have adopted a blasé attitude towards signage, are there methods to get them to pay attention when we want them to?

I would suggest a couple of possible solutions:

1. Make it beautiful. People love beautiful things, and are more likely to spend time and attention on the things they love. Have a look at the Fun Theory for an inspiringly great example of this.
2. Make it useful. Consider utility above all else, and at every stage—how useful is it to provide that piece of information at that specific point? Büro Uebele’s excellent system for Parsevalschule Bitterfeld is an interesting attempt at providing visual relevance according to location, as separate from simply deciding which locations to show.
3. Break from conformity (but just a little). Often the most successful designs, advertisements and products do not conform to current paradigms—most people would think that the iPhone was a perfect example of this. Perhaps even its big brother, the iPad, which blew past all predictions of its success—and yet they’d be wrong. Often, it’s not just about being innovative, but about learning from the mistakes of the past, and then executing really well.

Of course, this is all easier said than done. Often, we attempt to simplify as much as possible the information delivery throughout the sites we work on. This means minimal signage, and working with architects to create intuitive environments. It also means that any information we do spell out is more effective, because there is little background noise to dampen the effect.

Ultimately, the best wayshowing systems will combine all three of the above characteristics, while keeping things as simple as possible.