I’ve been more stressed than usual lately: my mother is coming to visit the UAE. Many people would not understand the frustration of having family come to visit, but it is more complex than that for me. For one, my mom does not speak any English or Arabic at all. To top it all off, this will be her first time traveling to a non-French-speaking country. I can already imagine the hassle she will have to go through trying to understand certain words or how to ask a stranger for directions. I can totally relate to this experience after traveling to Italy and encountering many people who did not speak English, though the similarities between Italian and French helped me be a little more independent. In this blog, we will focus on what her journey might be like at the airport once she lands and goes out.
My mom is one of the most knowledgeable people I know. However, I can confidently say that she has never taken a wayfinding course. The beauty of wayfinding for humans is that much of it is done almost subconsciously. We tend to automatically use sensory cues to get a sense of which direction to take and which not to by leveraging the elements present in our environment.
Essential elements that she will leverage include signs. The problem with signs in the UAE for her will be that they are in English and Arabic (fig. 1).
Figure 1: Bilingual English-Arabic signs in the Dubai Airport
While she will not be able to understand any words on the signs, she will be able to use other elements on them, such as pictograms. Pictograms are powerful visual communication tools that convey meaning through a visual resemblance to a physical object or action. Pictograms are designed in such a way that they are recognizable across multiple and diverse communities of people. In other words, the same pictogram will most likely convey the same message whether it is in Buenos Aires or Porto. In the case of my mom, seeing a stick figure pointing at an open door in a particular direction is almost an obvious sign that the panel indicates an exit (fig. 2).
Figure 2: Exit Pictogram
Another element that airport signs have are gates and terminals, which arguably form the backbone of any airport. Having gates and terminals numbered makes their structures more obvious, which can be useful in wayfinding. A simple application could be the use of inference. Inference is a wayfinding technique that makes use of the structural quality of the environment to make predictions about the structure of the rest of the surroundings. This can be done by using interpolation and extrapolation. Let us consider an example where my mom arrives at Terminal 3 in Dubai Airport and needs to head to Terminal 1. If the terminals are numbered, this must mean that they have a sequence as follows: 1, 2, 3, and so on. By interpolation, my mom will know that the terminal she is currently in is past the one she is supposed to be at. This means that she can then use the signs and backtrack to get to terminal 2. The opposite would also apply. If she were in Terminal 2 and wanted to head to Terminal 3, she would need to extrapolate and understand that the third terminal is most likely ahead of her.
Sometimes, though, things do not go as smoothly, as all airports are not created equal. Some have better designs than others, and when the system fails to guide individuals, we need to rely on the people around us. This is where social navigation comes into play. Social navigation is, in essence, the ‘exploitation’ of knowledge and experience of individuals in the same physical location as us. We can often be in situations where multiple people need to be at the same location. In airports, this could be needed to go to passport control right after landing. Using social navigation in this context for my mom would mean following a crowd composed of people from the same flight that are heading in a particular direction, which is most likely the exit. While this is a powerful concept, we need to be extra careful, as we should account for crowds moving towards gates for connecting flights.
Despite the various methods that we can use to find our way through places like airports, the possibility of getting lost in the end is still present, whether it’s taking a wrong turn or going up when we should have gone straight instead. For this reason, an important wayfinding principle that I believe Dubai Airport and many others implement very well is forgiveness. Forgiveness in wayfinding is a practice that accounts for some mistakes individuals or even the system might make. Redundancy is an essential practice in this effect. For example, Dubai airport has very repetitive signs indicating the same gates or exits to account for missed turns. Therefore, if my mom turns left where she should have turned right, I am confident that she will be able to realize it quickly enough and change directions.
Ultimately, I believe that the single best predictor of how smoothly her time at the airport will be is her experience. Experience plays a key role in the way we think about wayfinding. Across regions and cultures, conventions are held that help people be more adaptable when they change environments. Since she has already been to other airports, she will understand that the general process of landing and exiting from them is largely similar. If it were her very first time in an airport, I speculate that she would have had a harder time finding her way, as she needs to know what needs to be done (passport control, baggage claim) on top of finding her way to the exit.
When we are navigating foreign places, environmental cues and often unconscious processes allow us to find our way regardless of language barriers. While they are essential, prior experience in the face of the unknown always makes the process much easier. This is why I believe in having conventions in design across nations. This way, it is more likely for people to come across something they have already experienced in the past, which makes the user experience smoother.
I like how you tied in wayfinding with designing experiences. I’m curious about how airports can implement universal pictograms to help those non-English/non-Arabic speakers better navigate the airport if it is their first time at an airport.
It’s so interesting how you thought of the wayfinding experience from your mom’s point of view as someone who doesn’t speak English or Arabic. Things like social navigation and interpolation are life skills, really – and I think an airport is one of the places where you can really use social navigation worry-free, the crowd getting off the same plane as you will most probably take the same route out. Even if you accidentally end up in a crowd of connecting flight passengers, the Dubai airport is pretty forgiving, which is great!
I like how you tied wayfinding to a personal experience because as much as we like to analyze and deconstruct the discipline from an academic point of view, ultimately, wayfinding is something that is very intimate to all of us. It is deeply connected to the safety and comfort of those we love, and I think it is beneficial to keep this personal element in mind as we go about our practice. I also think we take for granted that English is becoming a universal language and are often prone to forgetting that there is a large part of world that still does not speak English. As designers, our job is to remember them and design for them and their safety and comfort as well. Great post!
It was such a thoughtful idea to consider how your mother might navigate Dubai. My mom has friends all around the world that can help take her around so I’ve never imagined a world where I need to help her out myself. I love how you acknowledge how despite how knowledgeable your mom is, that won’t help her navigate in languages she can’t read. Language on signage is a big challenge as we know very well ourselves. I believe Yogesh Dandekar mentioned the difficulties of including many languages on signage during the symposium. We can’t overload a sign with every language we think the navigators might need, that’s for sure. It’s through this wayfinding class that I learned the idea of universal design: design that transcends language barriers and disability. Definitely one of the biggest takeaways for myself.
I’ve actually always wondered if I would be able to navigate in Europe. I’ve confirmed Italy, at least Rome, is very English friendly due to the similarities between Italian and English. I thought French would be similar enough considering the familiar alphabet, but perhaps that isn’t as true as I thought (I know nothing about French except French keyboards are very funky to me).
I hope your mom is able to comfortably navigate Dubai. I think for places like Dubai mall if she plans to go there, the Dubai Mall navigation app has languages like French to help non-English and Arabic speakers to navigate. Either way, I wish you have a wonderful time during her visit!
My mom also does not speak English or Arabic, and she’s only traveled by plane once in her life. So I do get the stress about her coming to the UAE. However, you mentioned experience as being essential in wayfinding, and even thought I’ve traveled a lot in the past years, I sill get lost or forget a step at the airport, so redundancy and social navigation are more helpful to me. And I think that’s more important for older people, as well as forgiveness in wayfinding at airports. On the other hand, too much information can feel overwhelming. So I agree with your idea of an international convention of signs and wayfinding systems between airports around the world, that would ease the life of everyone!