Wayfinding - Understanding it as a sociacultural experience

Understanding Wayfinding as a Sociocultural Experience

Wayfinding is a practice that is much more than  something which exists for the benefit of the individual who needs to get from A to B. 

The three main elements of wayfinding:

1. Wayfinding has many stakeholders – Apart from the individual person who is trying to find their way, wayfinding practice can include business owners (such as the gift shop owner who needs to try and persuade people to want to choose their location to pass by and to enter) and a variety of other stakeholders.
2. Wayfinding takes place in social locations – the design of wayfinding systems need to factor in the way in which sociocultural elements impact upon the process. Crowd behaviour, for example, greatly influences the way in which we move in emergency situations.
3. Wayfinding is an embodied practice – and is one that is often heuristic in that bodily needs, ability and so on, directly affect and impact upon route decisions.

Wayfinding and Stakeholders

Wayfinding always involves a number of stakeholders and these can include:

• Landowners;
• The person trying get somewhere;
• Institutions (including governments);
• Vendors (such as retail outlets);
• Transport providers (including limousine services, taxi drivers);
• Signage makers;
• Local people.

Iit is very useful to appreciate this range of peoples who influence, guide and shape the process. For example, the needs of an airport, a location which needs to be profitable in order to survive. In the UK, many airports take a percentage of the income from sales that retail outlets make inside the airport. As a result, guiding passengers is not necessarily about guiding them via the quickest or most direct route. For airport owners, the best option can be to guide passengers past key points of sale. Here, the concept of ‘steering behaviour’ is used, as signage and the design of the space is shaped so to increase sales. 

The Social Reality of Wayfinding

• With other people, such as with friends or a loved one.
• We may be responsible to guide others as a tour guide or partner to someone disabled.
• We have to wayfind past, alongside others, or using the same facilities and spaces.
• We may follows others in the belief, wrongly or rightly, that they are going in the direction we also want to.

Wayfinding is a highly social activity and one that also can be highly cultural. It is now possible to fly worldwide and trying to find the way in a country where we do not understand the language, are unfamiliar with the location and without a guide, is not unusual. A large international airport such as Gatwick Airport, can in fact see people from 150 countries, who speak a hundred plus languages go through its location just in 24 hours and yet, all of these people need to be able to find their way. 

Embodiment and Wayfinding

Those who study psychology and attach ONLY cognitive elements are missing key parts of the realistic practice that is wayfinding. Even in the most isolated of places, such as in the countryside where we are alone, the body, as a whole, is linked to wayfinding. Our ability, to attempt certain routes because of our physical ability can limit us. To find the way along certain mountainous areas might mean that the path depends on the physical ability to climb past certain areas. Likewise, routes change because of the need to portage a canoe or rely on our ability to find an entry point for the canoe. Wayfinding, in other words, is a fully embodied practice and to classify it as a cognitive only process, at the very least, is naive.

– Written by Paul Symonds