Author: bab9755

My interest in multiple fields simultaneously sparked my enthusiasm for NYUAD as a provider of a liberal arts education. The core curriculum promotes interdisciplinarity and offers a breadth of knowledge. The Wayfinding class significantly contributed to my skillset, making me a better designer. I believe that the same skills and lessons are largely transferable to other areas of life.

Awareness and Details

Before the Wayfinding class, I was not conceptually very aware of what it meant to be guided by a system from point A to point B. Although I had always been subconsciously using wayfinding strategies (discussed in my previous blog), I never deeply considered them, or the different reasons why I might get lost trying to find a place in town. The class ‘awakened my senses’ as a designer through various exercises and practices, such as creating a networking map, and through lectures that featured interesting visuals about design problems in our environment. In particular, the issue of accessibility became much more important to me. Last semester, I broke my foot and was unable to access most buildings without help for about 5 weeks. Reflecting on this experience, I wished the school had implemented better systems to allow people with disabilities to navigate without difficulties. As designers, our role is to create habitable homes, schools, cities, and planets for everyone to benefit from, and carefully considering accessibility is an essential component of that mission.

Accessibility issues are more prevalent than we might think. Solving these issues involves more than just placing an element in the environment; the integration of the element with the environment is what truly matters. A recent example is when I was at Al Ghubaiba station waiting for a bus. In the picture below, there is tactile paving on the floor. However, its path leads directly into a crowd control barrier, where the wait line forms.

Tactile paving at Al Ghubaiba Station

Since the crowd control barriers are mobile, it would have been very easier to just place them in a way where the entry start at the end of the tactile paving, allowing people to be able to use it correctly.

Aside from accessibility, I have also become more aware of design patterns in the environment in general. This new mindset allows me to be more analytical about the effectiveness of elements in guiding people and what I could potentially improve. A quick example is the signage for restrooms and prayer rooms for men and women at Dubai Mall.

Female prayer room sign (top) and male prayer room sign (bottom) in Dubai Mall

 

As we can see, the signage is inconsistent across the male and female prayer rooms. Initially, I thought having nearly two signs for the male prayer room was a form of redundancy to ensure clarity. However, I now believe that maintaining consistency across locations, such as the female prayer room here, is also vital and should be considered.

The Importance of System Design

People’s movements and decisions are influenced by the systems in place in an environment. These systems are therefore highly influential in how people live their lives and interact with their surroundings and each other. Whether designing a system for wayfinding, a grocery-shopping app, or a football stadium, understanding human psychology is crucial.

 

I became even more conscious of the importance of system design after learning about the Zimbardo prison experiment in class. A fundamental oversight of the experiment was the lack of consideration for human psychology. This may not have been intentional, but it was certainly due to a lack of understanding of the effects of power on human behavior. This shows that every system and design should consider human psychology and how people respond to various stimuli and situations. Reflecting on past experiences, my colleagues and I realized we had made a significant mistake in organizing a conference last year. Although we had planned a marketing strategy to attract students and professionals, the most common feedback was that many people, including attendees and non-attendees, were unclear about the event’s purpose. Consequently, many attendees were frustrated because the event did not meet their expectations. After introspection, we found our marketing system lacked clarity and precision and could have benefited greatly from focusing on content that clearly demonstrated what attendees could expect from the experience.

I have always valued core classes at NYU for their ability to enrich various aspects of our lives, from sparking interesting discussions at lunch to applying lessons to crucial parts of other projects. While I have learned a lot, there is still much more to discover to cultivate the mind of a designer.

 

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.

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.

Curiosity about art and its true meaning led me to take a January Term in Madrid, Spain: a hub for masterpieces and for those who enjoy art, from amateurs to connoisseurs. While the architectural beauty and the walkability of the city captivated me, my friends and I felt the need for warmer weather for the weekend. After careful planning and reading online reviews and suggestions, all our hearts were set on moving south to Barcelona. Wayfinding had been extremely easy during my time in Spain because of how well all the documentation relating to navigation was on point: metro stations, bus routes, and mainly Google Maps to get to campus or find the next quirky restaurant to try out after evening class.

On D-Day, I unfortunately woke up late and dreaded the possibility of missing my train to Barcelona. As I rushed out of the student apartments, I reflexively checked Google Maps and looked for ‘Bilbao’, the metro station that was supposed to lead me to the ‘Atocha’ train station. To my surprise, the station was just ten minutes away, and I had about thirty minutes to spare to get to the station on time. “Everything in Madrid is so easy to find with Google Maps, and I should find my way in no time, right?” Wrong. In this blog, while recounting my experience being lost, confused, and ultimately missing my train to Barcelona, I will also highlight some pain points I encountered during my wayfinding journey.

 

My day, therefore, continued with a race against the clock and a heavy, cold, and rainy early morning. The relief I felt after seeing “Bilbao” on a bright red, black, and blue sign almost made me forget about how much I was sweating under my coat. After going down and swiping my card on the electronic controller, I directed myself to the two boards that were showing the available pathways in the station. Unfortunately, I had to go through the panels four times before realizing that ‘Atocha’ was not present. The content of signs is an important part of wayfinding and generally answers the following questions: Where are people going? Where do they need the information? (Gibson, “The Wayfinding Handbook,” 63) I was, therefore, overwhelmed with confusion when the sign did not show the way I was supposed to go. After about ten minutes of going back and forth, I met a man who kindly told me where the line to Atocha was. After a stressful five minutes of us trying to understand each other because of language barriers, he told me that I was supposed to go down line 2. “Hooray,” I told myself. As I rushed down the stairs, the train arrived, but it was on the other side of the rails, and I was too late to catch it. The next metro was arriving in ten minutes, which was exactly the amount of time left before my train departed. Defeated, I decided to head out of the metro station and take a walk around. As I walked by, I happened to see another Bilbao station literally 150 meters away from the one I was in. 200 meters later, I saw two other similar stations on each side of the street. This is when I decided to pull up Google Maps to double-check the surroundings. To my great surprise, Maps only represented a single Bilbao station (see fig. 1) and directed me to it by default. Because maps are designed to help people position themselves in space by placing them in relation to other physical objects, they need to include appropriate ‘information requirements’ and ‘geography’ of the setting depicted. (100) The very lack of object or landmark representation can cause a lot of confusion and mislead the public.

Figure 1: Map of Madrid with the Red Pin pointing to the Bilbao Metro Station Google Maps referred to The 3 other bright red circles are an approximation of where the three other Bilbao stations were relative to the first one.

 

Reflecting on this experience, I realize that while maps are always useful, they cannot be seen as ‘perfect,’ or as a guarantee to get to the place we want. It is the mistake that I personally made with Google Maps, by believing in its infallible accuracy at giving a representation of the city. Acknowledging that a wayfinding tool or system might not be accurate can help us take measures to make sure we do not get lost in the end. For example, it is most likely better to get all the information we need about getting to a place before putting all of our trust in the technology, like asking locals for directions to make sure or have someone who already knows the place. In my specific case, that also includes waking up much earlier to make sure I have enough time to find my way again to account for when wayfinding systems in cities do not do much of a good job getting us places.