Of course there are many challenges in an effort such as this. Bringing diverse and far-flung communities together will require a tremendous amount of communication and coordination. So the presentation culminated in an open discussion about how communities have approached this challenge, and what that might mean to us locally with the Grand Vision.

The session summary is located here, as well as an early AM interview by our local NBC affiliate.

Regional Identity Through Wayfinding

Kathy Long-Holland presents the discussion topics

I had invited Kathy Long Holland, a management consultant from Portland, OR to develop a “fast break” discussion with five topics relevant to today’s business leaders. She introduced them briefly to the audience, then we assigned topics to each table for further debate.

“The future is already here … it’s just not evenly distributed.”
William Gibson

Most of the people in the room are competitors. But in this open, collaborative environment, we quickly found common ground as these topics signal larger trends in society. For many of us, the conversation was as much about designing a life as it was about design firm management. I’ve collected a few key thoughts from each conversation:

Topic One: Economic Turmoil
Often event driven, business leaders have a choice: adapt to changing conditions or fail. We watch the economy closely for signs, and make sure we’re prepared to take advantage of the entrepreneurial opportunities that arise.

Designers are being pulled in two directions:

• The idea, the concept, the “trusted advisor” consultative service
• Commoditized design – value in production, lower prices

One positive outcome of economic turmoil is the ability to restructure, rethink assumptions. For our firms:

• Consider virtual teaming to bring in a variety of skill sets to solve a given problem. You’ll have lower overhead, and increased opportunity to interact and learn from other disciplines.
• Can you offer new services to an underserved market? Can you expand services to your existing clients by forging partnerships with other firms?

For our clients:

• Consider reducing the project fee for regular payments
• Renegotiate existing contracts to benefit your clients, providing more immediate value
• Consider long-term system maintenance contracts for your projects (think of it as an owner’s manual).
• Research and offer creative financing alternatives to mitigate funding-based project delays.

Members of the Principals and Partners group discuss Economic Turmoil and offer advice.

Topic Two: 65+
This age group owns the economic wealth, and has the means to demand more from us as designers. The challenge is to integrate intuitive interfaces and seamless content across a variety of media.

• Design must be simplified, legible, and intuitive. Many 65+ are clamoring for technology that is less complex, but does more to suit their needs.
• Increased demand for resort-style living, with walkable amenities such as medical facilities and businesses that cater to the elderly on site, connect them to transit.
• Continuing education is a priority: Museums, history – a desire to reflect, learn, experience.
• Reach out to that “audience of one” with targeted communications, especially with regard to wayfinding tools.

Topic Three: Devolution
Social Media has devolved quickly, to the point where no one believes anything anymore. For our companies and our clients, what is the integrity of the message? What does one do to protect both personal and corporate security online?

Should we be forming “anti-social networks” favoring instead a return to old-fashioned relationship building?

• Social media is predominantly market/buyer oriented. Face to face always trumps virtual contact.
• Even though you may “feel” in tune and connected, is social media justifiable?
• Third-party endorsements validate Internet messages: it’s much better for a client or colleague to recommend you via LinkedIn than for you to spout how good you are on Twitter.
• Due to technical glitches, such as incorrect messages in digital and static tools, no one believes anything anymore.
• There is no security or privacy anymore online.

Topic Four: Throw Away
There is an inherent conflict between consumption-driven economies and ecosystem limitations. As designers, we have a responsibility, both to our clients and the environment, to design intelligent systems that inform and direct in a sustainable way.

For our firms:

• Look at your office space requirements, staffing models. Do what you can to reduce your footprint and be more efficient.
• Staffers working from home use less power.
• Build sustainable products, materials into your design process, office operations.
• Build sustainable policies into your culture: four day, 10 hour work week
• Purchase transit passes rather than paying for parking

For our clients:

• Creating sustainable design solutions needs to be more than just fashionable; it needs to be a mandate.
• Use new technologies to save on travel
• Rely on digital systems to replace unfriendly, material-heavy design outcomes: exhibits, environments
• Be aware of your consumption, downstream effects of products that will eventually end up in landfills

What will fuel our future consumption, and at what cost to the environment? This is a design challenge, not a political one.

Mark VanderKlipp addresses peers at the Principals and Partners Luncheon

Topic Five: RIGHT NOW
Everyone wants information immediately. In a service business, you need to master both the message and the technology to reach your audiences clearly in an increasingly noisy world.

People create “false lives” around informational immediacy; thinking that they have to be plugged in at all times. We need to pull back and see the big picture without being distracted by information overload.

• Work is always due “now;” step back and analyze. What’s necessary? Is the client asking for real results or do they just want information quickly?
• Framing the project: ask “why” before asking “how.”
• Maintaining quality in the ‘right now’ is the most challenging part. Are we working so fast that we lose sight of project objectives?
• Know who you are, what you stand for, why you’re relevant to clients so you can respond to the “right now” in appropriate ways.
• There will never be enough time. Carve time out of your life to build the firm you want to be in – know your brand and own it!

Sponsored by the Growth and Investment and Transportation working groups, this presentation is one in a series of three events for Grand Vision volunteers and the general public relating to transportation issues throughout Northern Michigan.

The presentation takes place on Wednesday, July 28. More information:

Regional Wayfinding Information Forum
The Grand Vision
Quad Cities News Release

The Quad Cities of Illinois and Iowa are home to many unique tourist destinations, such as Lagomarcino's.

The post features each mayor of the Quad Cities (actually five cities in two states) speaking to the value that the wayfinding system brings to their local area and the region as a whole:

1. “The idea for the wayfinding system has been a long time coming.  The system will be a wonderful addition to each city’s signage.  Not only will it assist visitors, but it will show the continued support the communities in our area have for each other. This is a progressive move that will benefit everyone.” City of Bettendorf Mayor Mike Freemire
2. “Wayfinding signage is a great idea for helping people navigate the riverfront and all the attractions the Quad Cities has to offer.  It’s another example of how cooperation among cities shows that we are all livable communities with a lot to offer visitors and residents alike.” City of Davenport Mayor Bill Gluba
3. “Those of us who have called the Quad Cities home all of our life know the boundaries of our cities, but for visitors it can be confusing.  The new Wayfinding system is an easy to understand, color coded system that will make our community more user friendly” City of East Moline Mayor John Thodos
4. “The new wayfinding system allows the Quad Cities to come together as one destination while preserving the unique characters of each community.” City of Moline Mayor Don Welvaert
5. “The Wayfinding System provides us with an excellent method of making the Quad Cities region more friendly and accessible to visitors to our area.  With our multiple jurisdictions and a river that runs east to west, the new signage will help newcomers find their way more easily, around our diverse and beautiful area.” City of Rock Island Mayor Mark Schwiebert

Corbin Design’s strategy involved developing a wayfinding icon that visually describes the orientation of the Mississippi to the cities in the region. This icon serves as a landmark of sorts, visibly identifying wayfinding elements from a distance.

For the complete story, including how community support and funding were managed, link to the blog post here:

People Get Lost and New Wayfinding System Will Fix That

Kudos to the Quad Cities CVB for the takeoff on our tagline!

Corbin Design and its partner firm, Avenue ISR generated this report, soon to be released.

A recent article in the Kansas City Star illustrates a project that Corbin Design directed for Hablamos Juntos. Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we were engaged by the SEGD and Hablamos Juntos for a research and design recommendations process. We led the project in partnership with Avenue ISR to develop baseline research around how people with limited English proficiency (LEP) access health care, whether they speak another language or have physical limitations. In some cases, the patients in the test facilities were from cultures unfamiliar with western medical practices – definitely a challenge to reach and direct such diverse audiences!

The objective of this process is to develop a standardized set of universally recognized symbols to describe medical procedures common throughout the majority of healthcare institutions. The difficulty, of course, is employing imagery that is intuitive to a broad spectrum of hospital patients, staff and visitors. Our task was to design standards for applying these symbols to wayfinding signage, then test their effectiveness for the audiences in question.

The article does a great job of describing the process that Children’s Mercy is currently rolling out:

Children’s Mercy Hospital is installing new signs to make the complex easier to navigate

A quick summary of our research results:

• 92% of all subjects agreed that they could easily find their destinations using the symbols based wayfinding system
• People from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds (from English and Spanish to Somali and Khmer) were able to effectively use the symbols to navigate
• Low literacy populations navigated the hospital more efficiently as well
• Even for those with excellent English reading and comprehension, the symbol system served as an effective support to finding destinations.

The IDA’s position on the paper:

Downtown development maximizes the value and use of transportation infrastructure through compact development. By their very nature, downtowns support livable communities, economic competitiveness and environmental sustainability constructs of the USDOT’s Strategic Plan. In addition, downtown management organizations provide reliable local partners for advancing the USDOT Strategic goals and objectives. Through its leadership, membership organizations, communication network and conferences, IDA is uniquely positioned to help the USDOT promote and support this plan, including:

• Identifying and/or developing local delivery system(s) through IDA and its membership organizations around the country to support the implementation of the USDOT Strategic Plan.
• Communicating to local and state leadership to support USDOT to meet these goals
• Help identify local funding sources including special assessments, tax increment and others
• Offer best practices in parking management, behavioral incentives such as congestion pricing, communications, marketing and PR strategies, multi‐disciplinary approaches to problem‐solving, TOD and others.

The report includes five major areas of interest: road safety, state of good repair, maintaining economic competitiveness, livable communities and environmental sustainability. Read the entire report here:

USDOT Strategic Plan: “Transportation for a New Generation” Summary

This is the first in a series of interviews with Colin Ellard, author of “You Are Here – Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon but Get Lost at the Mall.” When the book came out in 2009, we first read it cover to cover, then sent an email to Colin to ask more specific questions about wayfinding in general. We hope you enjoy these excerpts from our interview.

You Are Here, by Colin Ellard

Corbin:
As environmental graphic designers, we work every day designing solutions for people who get lost. We’ve found an increasing awareness on the part of clients for our services, and an increasing expectation of a well-designed environment from their target audiences. Did you write this book to respond to this trend, or conversely, have you seen an outpouring of interest from people who have finally “seen the light” as far as the value of wayfinding?

Ellard:
I’ll be completely honest about this and tell you that I came to this subject by a long and idiosyncratic route. I began scientific life as a student of animal behaviour, focused on how animals found their way but also how they used their understanding of space to cope with the basic problems of life: finding food, shelter, defense from predators, and so on.

It was only in 2005 that I began to think about the wider implications of the work I was doing. I remember thinking that it would be a great way to understand how animals processed spatial information if, rather than me building all kinds of contraptions to test their abilities, they could just somehow build their OWN contraptions. I blush now when I think of how long it took for me to realize that there is such an animal, and of course we’re it.

I began to talk to people who were in the business of building spaces — architects and planners. Though designers understood the importance of thinking about how people navigate spaces, they were frustrated by a lack of interest among scientists in putting the connections between design and psychology on an empirical basis. I was thrilled to discover that something I had stumbled on also appeared to be something in which there was a good deal of interest.

So really, I wrote the book to get that kind of project started — a marriage of psychology and design.

Corbin:
We know that design is a business of managing multiple perspectives. But the most important perspective is that of the potential visitor. Do you see a future where behavioral psychology is merged more fully with design disciplines to anticipate those needs? If so, what would the merging of those disciplines look like?

Ellard:
We’re poised at the threshold of doing absolutely brilliant things at the interface of design and psychology. In part this is simply because we’re ready — there’s a great thirst for multidisciplinary approaches to solving real world problems. Increasingly, behavioural scientists (at least the ones I talk to) are realizing that the really exciting prospects for future work involve climbing down from ivory towers and taking fresh, new perspectives.

But there are other reasons to be excited about such a merger, because of the kinds of technology available now. In our lab, we can simulate a built environment using immersive virtual reality; much the same way we can test in real built settings. Imagine being able to design a structure in pixels, and have people visit the virtual structure not only to tell you what they think of it, but also to have access to their brain and body states so that you know exactly how the environment affects them. We can measure many aspects of behaviour: eye gaze, body movement, emotional state, brain waves. It turns design into a new kind of science and I get goosebumps thinking about the possibilities.

Makes me wish I was just starting out rather than being halfway through the race!

————————————————–
Colin Ellard is a professor in the psychology department at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He has been conducting research and writing about the psychology of spatial perception for the last 25 years. Check out Colin’s blog here.

“We listen closely to our clients and what their end users need. We also watch trends in the economy and society to verify that information. Because everyone at some point gets lost, or at least disoriented, we have a broad pool of experience to draw from.”

Note: the article will open in a Web browser using the zmags viewer; the article begins on Page 6 of the magazine

Link to “Allowing Creativity to Flow”

Northwest Michigan Business Magazine, April 2010

When you link to the articles, make sure you read the comments on each. Great conversations about wayfinding!

View the GPS article here
Read the entire series here

Link to the article