Wayfinding
How people orient, navigate and form mental maps of environments: spatial cognition, legibility, landmarks, signage and the environmental information systems that make places parseable. Rooted in Lynch's urban legibility work and environmental cognition research.
In activity-based and shared workplaces, wayfinding stops being a signage afterthought and becomes operational infrastructure: people must repeatedly find settings, colleagues and their own bearings in environments without fixed anchors. Illegible workplaces tax cognition, suppress setting use and quietly defeat the mobility the concept assumed.
- Can people parse this environment: find settings, predict what's where, orient without effort?
- Which spatial and visual cues carry navigation, and which decorate it?
- How does legibility interact with setting choice and mobility behaviour?
- What do digital wayfinding layers add, and what can't they substitute for?
- Environmental cognition and spatial navigation research
- Lynch's legibility framework and successors
- Space syntax intelligibility measures
- Observed navigation behaviour and setting-discovery patterns
Legibility designed structurally — sight lines, landmarks, differentiated zones — before signage compensates; setting taxonomy made visually parseable so the kit explains itself; digital wayfinding integrated with booking, not layered over confusion; neurodiversity-informed predictability as a wayfinding requirement.
Kit of Parts
The definition of the complete workplace setting system — every setting type, its purpose, quantity, requirements and behavioural logic — from focus and team settings to hospitality, wellbeing and specialist environments.
Stacking and Blocking
The allocation of teams, functions and zones across floors and buildings — converting adjacency evidence, capacity models and building constraints into a spatial distribution.
Architectural Guidance
The translation of the concept and kit into design-governing guidance: spatial, environmental, acoustic, lighting, thermal, biophilic, accessibility, technology and identity requirements the design team must satisfy.
Workplace Behaviour Review
The periodic qualitative review of how people actually behave in the workplace — the norms, adaptations and workarounds that quantitative streams register but cannot explain.
Signage as apology: graphic design deployed to patch an illegible plan. Wayfinding failures observed post-occupancy are usually spatial-structure failures; more signs are the symptom's treatment, not the cause's.
Navigation in multi-location and hybrid patterns — people orienting in buildings they visit weekly rather than inhabit daily — is a newly relevant and thinly studied condition.