The importance of wayfinding in events: close look at the wayfinding system at Slush 2023 Helsinki

For the longest time, I thought that I would only use a map in a foreign country or city with which I am not super familiar. However, after attending Slush 2023 in Helsinki, I realized that wayfinding can indeed be applied everywhere, even at events and conferences. Let us take a look at the intricacies of finding your way in a mishmash of 12,000 people in a basement in the Great North of Europe.

Slush is an entrepreneurship conference that gathers thousands of founders, investors, and tech nerds (like me) in Finland to meet and power up business ecosystems that spread around the world. It is not your formal suit-and-tie type of event, but more of a feisty one where fun and innovation co-exist.

Wayfinding in an event of such a scale is crucial for diverse reasons. For one, Slush is about meeting people with common interests. This means that it needs to be as easy as possible for two or more individuals to communicate and know where they are going to meet as quickly as possible. Secondly, Slush is a big mess, which means that it is important for wayfinding designers to create pathways in such a way that they do not get too crowded to the point where navigation is almost impossible. This involves making decisions about how large certain pathways should be, the timings of the different events, as well as the prediction of the flow of people at a given time period.

One amazing thing about Slush is that they created their own one-stop app where you can find all the information you need to navigate Slush. Features include lists of the various types of people present, information about the different keynotes and panels, and, more importantly for this essay, a map. Let us take a closer look at it and talk about the good and the bad.

The good.

In terms of the main venue, which comprised 4 stages in total, the map was surprisingly accurate in terms of the venues relative to each other. The venue is a large underground auditorium shaped like a square with a design intended for people to navigate it counterclockwise, from right to left. The map had a clear legend of each location, as well as what each location was intended for. I believe this is the power digital maps have over other physical ones: the amount of information you can add in them is much higher, since you can nest text or element within others (clicking on the venue on the map for a pop-up window to show more information about it). In this way, the map helps in two functions: not only does it tell you how to get to the place you want to be, it also allows you to see other places and gives you information for you to judge whether you want to get to that place. With traditional physical maps, seeing a coffee place might not necessarily compel me to visit it as much as if it could access more information about it regarding what it has to offer (fun activities, specialty coffees, etc).

Another aspect of Slush that made the wayfinding experience more straightforward and less stressful was the presence of the Slush Volunteers. These volunteers can be found at various determining points where confusions can happen in terms of which turn or room to take. While they are not a part of the map per se, they are part of the entire system that is supposed to make it effortless for people to navigate the venue.

The bad.

I mentioned earlier that the map was very accurate in terms of places relative to each other. However, it was only after exploring the venue for the first time for about 15 minutes that I realized the map was upside down orientation-wise. This created a lot of disorientation in my head, which required me to go back and forth to figure out the actual mapping and directions. If other people had the same problem as me, a lot of the first-timers would clutter the entrance of the venue trying to figure out where they were actually going.

Another drawback that the map had was a lack of representation of the different floors within the venue. A priori after looking at the map, it is easy to assume that everything is happening on one level. After consulting the agenda, I wanted to attend one panel that was happening in a room quite far from where I currently was. After walking for a while, I had traced exactly where the location was supposed to be on the map, but realized that I was not where I was actually supposed to be. After asking around a lot and following people who seemed to be interested in the same event as me, I figured that I was in the ‘right’ spot, but that the event was right above my head. The way to the elevator and the stairs was poorly lit because of the vibe and aesthetic of the event, so figuring out that there were actual floors was harder than it should have been.

In conclusion, this experience taught me the importance of wayfinding even in settings such as 2-day events. Lots of decisions have to be made in terms of where we want attendees to go and how we make them get there as fast and efficiently as possible. Accuracy is everything, and it is always good to have external support in venues (such as volunteers) in case the main tool (the map) fails at accurately guiding people to where they want to go. I am planning on organizing a similar conference in late 2024 here at NYUAD, and those lessons are gems that I will make sure to implement when creating a wayfinding system for the D-Day.