As a result of hand held devices and digital user interfaces, users needs, habits, and existing knowledge of wayfinding has changed.  How can digital wayfinding strategies be applied in real world wayfinding systems to provide complex information and cognitive value to enhance navigation?

For this free writing exercise I’m a bit hesitant on which direction to go.  I’m torn between writing about what I know about spatial cognition and what I want to get out of this exercise.  I know that I’m not supposed to write with anything in mind, but rather just let my mind wander.  Which ironically is in complete opposition to what the crux of my thesis is about, which is to say that spatial cognition revolves around the notion that you know where you are in your space.  Not only which way is up and which is down, left, right, north, south etc. but where you actually are in your physical environment.  For example, I’m in my living room facing East, and if I wanted to go to my garage I would know exactly which way to face myself and start walking, which door to open and what turns to make.  If you were in my living room, and I asked you to walk to my garage, you may not know where to turn or where to go.  This is spatial cognition.  You would know where you were, but not necessarily where you were in your space and how that applies to going somewhere else.

So it’s a bit ironic then that I’m not sure where to go with this exercise.  I suppose that the free writing, or just letting your mind wander is supposed to take me to a place that I may not of thought to look for ideas.  Again, I think this is ironic, considering my subject.

One example that come immediately to mind are when you park your car in a multi-tiered parking deck, or perhaps at a large theme park, or airport, where there are not only thousands of parking spots, but there may also be many levels or parking areas.  We all know how challenging it can be to get back to your car.  Who hasn’t walked around, pressing the car lock or unlock on our key fob, or maybe even trying to set the panic alarm off so that we can hear and locate our car.  Our spatial cognition is limited because of unfamiliarity with the surroundings, and surroundings that are similar, or confusing.  There are various ways that signs help us, either color coded (you parked on the green level), or with numbers (you parked on level 4).  Further indicators may be available to us as well, such as sections within the green level (you parked on the green level, in section G5).  These are a tremendous help but can still pose basic positioning problems once we get to our car (how do I get out of here?).  The problem isn’t limited to just the parking deck. To further illustrate this example, suppose that you drive to a hospital, wind your way through the parking deck and then have to follow a series of corridors, elevators, lefts and right turns, various reception decks or even different building to find a specific location within the hospital to visit a friend.  This is where spatial cognition is valuable.  Once in the room, would you know how to get back to your car and back out of the parking deck?  It can be confusing to say the least.  This can be particularly difficult if we are in an unfamiliar city.  To add another twist to the story, lets remove the parking deck part of the story and suppose that you took a train or sub way to the hospital.  The entirety of your travel to the hospital may have been underground in a foreign city.  This further diminishes our spatial cognition when we can’t see where we were turning or how far we were traveling while we were en route.  Once in the hospital room, if I asked you to point in the direction of your house or apartment, would you know in which direction to start walking?

The simple answer, would be, “sure, let me just get out my phone and punch in my address”.  With GPS on nearly every phone these days, it takes the strain off of us, and puts it on the phone or device.  This ability has pretty much changed the way in which we expect to get around.  It has changed our habits and our expectations on how we navigate our world.  In some instances, our mobile devices have completely taken on the role of our brains spatial cognition for us.

Is it possible for wayfinding systems in the physical space (directional signs, parking deck indicators, etc.) to borrow concepts or technology from our smart phones and grant us this same level of awareness?  In addition to pointing the way to the green level parking deck, can wayfinding systems adapt to give us clues or tell us all together where we are, where we’ve been (in case we need to go back) and where we should go?  Can these signs work on an individual basis so that the experience is unique to individuals rather than a generic sign with an arrow letting us know that the elevator is to the left?

Really, perhaps the more important question is, does it matter?  I would think that yes, it does matter.  The way we navigate is much more spontaneous than most current wayfinding systems allow.  For example, once half way to our destination (we’ll stick with the hospital illustration), suppose we forgot a gift for the person that we were going to visit, and had to turn back.  Short of backtracking and remembering the route we took through the maze of elevators, corridors and parking decks, can wayfinding systems in the physical space adapt to our movements and give us that overall awareness of our location, in much the same way our phones do when we take a turn.  Can physical world wayfinding systems reroute us to the gift shop or provide us with short cuts so that we add waypoints (like the cafeteria – in the case that we were hungry and wanted a sandwich before we met our recovering friend).

What would these systems look like, and how would they react and change depending on our individual situations?  Suppose while we were visiting our friend, it started to rain outside, so the original route that we took to get to the hospital room that required us to walk outside was no longer the best route back to our car?  Could a physical world system provide us a better (perhaps dryer) route back to our car without us having to dart through the rain?

The way that we interact with our location isn’t static and I don’t think that wayfinding systems should be static either, especially since for all intents and purposes, we carry around computers in our pockets with GPS functions that can help us determine where we are in our space and what that means to us.  Not only do we know where North, South, East and West are, we know which direction to take, what stair case or elevator to step into, even in an unfamiliar location depending on our changing needs.

As a result of hand held devices and digital user interfaces, users needs, habits, and existing knowledge of wayfinding has changed. How can digital wayfinding strategies be applied in real world wayfinding systems to provide complex information and cognitive value to enhance navigation?

Effective navigational systems should not only provide route knowledge but also provide users special cognition. How then can wayfinding systems in the physical environment adapt design and navigational strategies from their digital wayfinding and navigational systems to provide users not only route knowledge, but special cognition as well?

Digital navigation strategies provide users with a higher level of cognitive orientation and special sense. Physical, real world navigational systems should seek to not only direct users to their desired location, but also provide them logical orientation and special knowledge, or where they are in their environment.

Existing wayfinding systems serve to direct users to a general or specific location, however individuals may successfully reach the appropriate destination and still be, effectively, lost. This is primarily evident when users require route reversal. In other words, you may be able to find a room in a large building, but not be able to find your way back to your parked car. Wayfinding systems allow for users to arrive at a location, but after arriving they can still be completely lost in their space. The ability to successfully provide navigation not only accommodates for route knowledge (how to get from point A to point B) but also allows users special sense, mitigating disorientation.

Digital navigation and environmental wayfinding systems both furnish users with directional listings, however the digital interface also provides environmental understanding of the surrounding space through visual cues, landmarks, traffic patterns, time constructs, and ordinal orientation, to name a few.

Effective wayfinding in a given space not only relies on directional listings and signage, but also on the physical characteristics of the environment, or how well the environment has been constructed. Since it is not always possible to change the existing landscape of the physical environment, can the principals of digital navigation be applied to physical navigational systems to alleviate poorly planned physical environments as well?

Wayfinding systems in the physical world can adapt design and navigational strategies from digital systems to enable special cognition, minimizing disorientation as a result of confusing environmental schemes, thereby increasing the users ability to perform a wayfinding task.

Wayfinding system kiosks and signage will be the primary media involved. However kiosks and signage will also incorporate and utilize digital devices to provide additional spatial cognition and rout knowledge. Additionally, survey views, vistas or “take away” maps will also be incorporated with the wayfinding systems, available for users who are not able to utilize digital devices on the go.

The first thesis that I looked at was written by Jay Bopp (who incidentally has an awesome name).  Jay graduated (presumably) or wrote his thesis for his MFA in graphic design in May of 2012.  I gravitated to this thesis because of the title alone: Empathy Within Orthodoxy: Fostering a Culture of Innovation in Faith-Based Organizations Through Design Thinking.

I’m recalling Marty McFly from Back to the Future when I read this, and think to myself… Whoa… that’s heavy, doc.

I have designed various things for faith based organizations before, and I know how difficult it is do pull this off.  One of the first things I designed out of undergrad was a website for a church, and looking back I think it was a miserable failure.  So naturally, I was drawn to this thesis topic.

The first thing that struck me while reading his thesis was that it started off with a story (literally, a story that he had made up) about urban warfare training for soldiers.  It was written like a novel, and immediately grabbed my attention.  For starters, it was completely not what I was expecting to hear, and reading further, it was very captivating.  I thought that it was an excellent lead in for a thesis.  It took the reader off guard, and snatched their attention right off the bat.  Starting off a thesis this way was not something I had considered before.  But I like this style of writing, and find that it’s easier to do and more fun to tie in these types of illustrations in to make a point, than to posit about various points that you are trying to make from your initial thesis topic.

Another thesis that grabbed my attention was Natural user interfaces in the information age by James E. Pierce.  This thesis persuaded me to select it because it deals (in part) with aspects of my own thesis (the user interface portion).  James Pierce wrote this thesis for his MFA in graphic design in 2011.

Interesting to me in this thesis topic is how James writes about a topic that we are all familiar with (the user interface) and specifically how technological advances are adopted by the masses through solid user interfaces.  What strikes me about this concept is that it is one that (on the outside) appears to be fairly obvious, something that we (as designers and artists) can almost all agree on.  So how then do you unpack and fully explain or argue a point to an audience that already presumes you are correct, or at the very least, on the right path?  Does it matter?  Does it make the thesis topic any less interesting or important?  Will the audience be more critical of something that they already feel they have a solid grasp or understanding or acknowledgement of?  Does the writer need to make some fantastical claim in order for his or her writing to be accepted, or do they just need to state obvious facts to further solidify a concept that is already widely held?

In his thesis, James writes about the natural user interface, or the concept that in order for an interface to maximize its effectiveness, it needs to be nearly invisible to the user, in order to allow for the user to interact with the computer (or device) in ways that are more natural to that individual.  In other-words, not letting the interface get in the way of the human-computer interaction.

I have to admit that I did not read the entirety of the 60 page thesis, I have saved it because I feel that this will be an vital part of how my thesis is constructed, as I will be dealing with how users needs, habits and assumptions have changed in way finding systems as a result of user interfaces (how has having a map with you at all times (smart phones) impacted physical world wayfinding systems and users spacial cognition).