Problem
My grandmother, while walking with me through a university hospital, confessed that she would’ve felt overwhelmed by the complicated layout and mere size of the hospital if she had come by herself. The hospitals did seek to seek to solve this problem with signs and arrows, but these weren’t enough. Finding time and time again the difficulty of navigating through big hospitals, I decided to seek a way to make such spaces more intuitive and less daunting for visitors.
Needfinding + Research
Wanted to find out more about this phenomenon my grandmother experienced, I visited 3 different hospitals and talked to a total of 28 patients. This helped me better understand the patients’ reasons for feeling overwhelmed at the hospitals, and I realized that these factors were applicable to other settings as well.
Speaking with my co-workers, I found that even our headquarters, which consisted of three interconnected structures, proved to be difficult to get around. Many couldn’t find their way to a particular meeting room and never knew which way to turn in order to get to their own office upon getting off the elevator. These thoughts also brought back a flood of memories from college where I often witnessed students getting lost in the commodious buildings or consulting the map of the building on the wall for lengthy periods before make their decision as to which way to go.
“Parts of the building may be visually hidden from other parts. Or the building may be laid out in an overly complex way ... Apparently people differ in terms of how many right turns and left turns they can remember before getting overwhelmed.”
“If the building has an obvious structure, with long lines of sight, you won’t have to rely much on this internal representation of your path ... People expect floors to have similar layouts, but the first five levels of the library are all different; even the outside walls don’t necessarily line up.”
Findings + Direction
The main factors for getting feeling overwhelmed and getting lost in buildings were as follows:
One’s ability to represent the big picture of the building
Short lines of sight
Different layout of floors within same building
Irregular shapes of walls
Visually hidden parts
Overly complex layout
Number of right turns and left turns being more than the number one can remember
How might we mitigate overwhelming sensations that arise from navigating complicated, nonintuitive structures by providing a solution that can be understood instinctively?
From the problems I identified through my research, I was able to determine the driving question for this project. The solution would ideally help to resolve all the factors contributing towards visitors feeling overwhelmed in a building by helping visitors get a sense of the direction they are walking in, know where they started out despite the numerous turns they take, and to educatedly guess how to reach their desired destination from their current location.
Design solution
A system using color gradations, whether on walls, columns, or signs, to get around buildings in an intuitive manner by stimulating our sense of direction. These visual cues provide intuitive clues that we can easily follow along, provided that we have a picture of the larger flow of colors in our minds. This solution saves us from having to figure out which direction to go in, to understand the layout and numbering protocol of the interior structure, to constantly look at our phones and trying to find our way to the right destination.
I tested this concept virtually at three different locations, which were known places for getting lost in from both interacting with numerous lost visitors as well as from interviews asking about places difficult to navigate through.
Case study A:
Angell Hall — Ann Arbor, MI
Case study B:
East Hall — Ann Arbor, MI
Case study C:
Kangnam Station — Seoul, South Korea
