Walk This Way

A friend of David Gibson’s once wrote on his Facebook page that he’s somebody who never seems to get lost. The author of a new book, The Way­finding Handbook: Information Design for Public Places (Princeton Archi­tectural Press), Gibson is not sure his friend got it entirely right (he actually ­enjoys wandering around a new city a little bit lost), but he has spent most of his professional life helping people navigate buildings, transportation systems, and public spaces. The Canadian-born graphic designer is the cofounder and managing principal of Two Twelve, an environmental-graphics firm responsible for a host of nationally recognized signage and way-finding programs, including work for Yale University, the Johns Hopkins Hos­pital, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard Medical School affiliates, Radio City Music Hall, and the cities of Baltimore and Hartford, Connecticut. The Wayfinding Handbook is Gibson’s first book and the latest volume in the publisher’s Design Briefs series. It offers a comprehensive look at the discipline, covering everything from managing projects to fabricating signs.Metropolis’s executive editor, Martin C. Pedersen, recently spoke to Gibson at his New York office about his way-finding pet peeves, the difficulty of health-care work, and his collaborations with architects and planners.

When you arrive at an airport or a train station, do you study the signs?
When I go to a foreign country or a place I don’t know, I’m uneasy until I have my take on the place, and that means physically understanding the environment. When I’m traveling I want to know: What’s the layout of this place? How do you use the transit? What’s the currency exchange? There are a few markers for understanding an environment or a culture. I’m interested in those things and sensitive to the cues. I read maps and signs well because I make them. I use those tools to get a feel for a place. I recently moved to Jersey City, and when I first got there I realized I didn’t understand it. But once I got the map out and saw the way the city was structured, I found I could build a deeper appreciation for my new home.

Do you have way-finding pet peeves? Are there things people get consistently wrong?
The main one is beautiful but useless signs. I’ve been called in to re-sign existing places a number of times, and often I’ll look at the signs and think, Wow, that’s a great layout, that’s really satisfying to look at, but it doesn’t do anything for my understanding of the place. My other pet peeve is airport gates. There is a rational way of numbering them, with odd numbers on one side and even on the other, all proceeding down a main corridor. Sometimes, though, they’ll number them down one side and back the other, so you’ll have Gate 3 directly opposite Gate 17 for no discernible reason.

What’s harder, designing signs for a new building or an existing one?
It’s harder to do it for an existing building because you’re untangling an already existing mess with a myriad of conflicting histories, conditions, and pathways. Though you can see what’s there and don’t have to imagine the space, it takes a lot of conviction to create a brand-new system for people in a place that may or may not be changing otherwise.

But in an existing building you already know the problem. You can only surmise that in a new building.
Yes, but I’m an optimist, so I always imagine this glorious future for the building, a clean slate, a brave new world. I can create signs, and they’re going to work. But it cuts both ways: an older hospital made up of twelve buildings from twelve different eras, perhaps some from different centuries—it can be a nightmare to draw all that together. I am good at that, though, and it’s very satisfying when we get it right.

Is health care one of the most difficult challenges?
Yes. Typically, hospitals in the United States are made up of a series of buildings. Way-finding begins with horizontal navigation to find the parts on the ground floor or connector floors. Then you have to move up through a series of vertical elements, elevators and escalators, and then you navigate horizontally again. So creating a system that knits together that first horizontal experience, that explains the building’s big idea, with your vertical ascent and ultimate destination, is a lot to do. If there’s no strategy, there tend to be a lot of signs that point to this thing or that. The bathrooms will be treated the same as the admitting office. When there’s no hierarchy, it becomes overwhelming and irritating, because you’ve got either too much information or not enough of the kind you need to get around.

I have a theory that great architecture makes signs redundant. A good example is Grand Central Terminal, where the building tells you exactly where you are.
I’ve done work at Grand Central. It’s a transportation center, and so there’s the great hall. The information booth is in the middle. Nobody needs a sign to find it or the adjacent tracks. But the station is also a shopping mall that has a few levels of retail and dining spread throughout the terminal. We’ve been working with them to try to figure out what can you do in this glorious landmark to help say: “You might consider leaving the great hall to go to other parts of the building.” It works brilliantly as a train station, but as a shopping mall it needs a lot of signs.

Because it wasn’t designed as a shopping mall.
I guess you could say that reinforces your point. But I don’t know how many times I’ve worked with architects who say, “Oh, this building speaks for itself. It doesn’t need signs.” In the end, there are certain messages and narratives that the architecture can’t speak to. Airports, hospitals, transit systems—all these major public facilities generally require a fair amount of signage. As people enter these places, they have a lot of questions. In information-intensive environments, people need certain information that bricks and mortar can’t provide.

At what point in the process do you enter the picture?
On master-plan projects in particular, it’s useful to come in early and provide a framework for way-finding, then go away for a bit while they sort out the plan, and then come back once they’ve worked out some of the architectural issues. This early involvement is useful to make signs not so much an appliqué but part of the organic structure of the building.

What do you do first on a large project?
We do research and analysis to identify what kind of way-finding is required and where information is needed. For a transit system, we first establish the array of signage and information elements that will be required throughout the network. We call this programming. This might remind the architects designing the train platforms to take into account the need for station maps on the platform, or about the array of information needed at arrival and fare-collection points. For theaters, we map the circulation pathways, analyze how people enter, identify threshold and decision points, and figure out how to direct people to different parts of the building.

In the book, you talk about finding the hidden logic of a place. How do you do that when it’s really hidden or not there at all?
First, we do a series of diagrams to determine how people will move through the space, and then we try to abstract those diagrams. There is always a logic. I have yet to find a place where I couldn’t impose some sort of system. But maybe this is the optimist and graphic designer in me that looks at these flows of people, sees patterns, and says, “I can create a beautiful system that is going to help people discover or understand an unfamiliar place.”