Lost in space: time for indoor wayfinding to catch up with city

Growing up in Boston, Massachusetts, which I did, gives you a nonstandard approach to finding your way to a desired destination.

In Boston, wiggly cow paths were, literally, turned into roads when settlers decided that their status as a New World metropolis required that they be able to reference street names in their letters to relatives back in the home country.

Later generations made many of those former cow paths one-way streets which further complicates outdoor direction-giving today as it is nearly impossible to remember which direction of travel is possible on which roads—but traffic is so bad in the midst of the city that any information related to driving is not much needed.

Maddeningly imprecise

People do a lot of walking in Boston, whether they’ve originally planned to or not.  Walking also gives you much more freedom in how you travel anyway. If you happen to see your destination across a park you can simply walk across the grass to get to it if you are on foot, you don’t need to snake through a mind-numbing network of one-way streets to arrive by car.

As a result of these local conditions, directions provided by Boston natives often seem maddeningly imprecise to visitors.  When asked where something is, a Bostonian will point in a general definition and say ‘Over there’. Streets will not be named, landmarks not specified.  Another Bostonian hearing ‘Over there’ carefully notes the needed direction of travel and goes in the needed direction, moving over hill and dale and left and right on streets and through public spaces to continue on the needed direction.

Non-Bostonians are frustrated when they don’t hear that they need to go down two blocks, turn right at the Filene’s, travel another two blocks, go left on Bowdoin and then look for the sign for the needed site on the front of the building. They bury their noses in their phones, following whatever GPS signals they can get in the old, dense city areas where transmission signals are often blocked, perhaps by malevolent wayfinding sprites.

Sense of direction

Maybe these sorts of rather indefinite directions and routes are why I have a good sense of direction today; it all may be due to early training at an impressionable moment in my development.

Regularly, although usually under duress, Bostonians do need to find their way outside the city and then GPS based systems benefit us as they do others. Like most adults of a certain age, I have selective amnesia related to reading maps and similar activities.  I can no longer accurately remember living in a dark age when maps were de rigeuer; sometimes it does not seem that life in such times was even possible.

GPS systems have made getting lost when travelling outdoors something of an embarrassment and one of the best excuses to being late laughable—even though it is true that in some inner-city neighbourhoods or areas near military installations GPS goes haywire.

Tyranny of indoors

Figuring out how to get from one place to another indoors, however, seems exactly the same today as many decades ago.  Confusing, poorly worded, misplaced signs indoors seem particularly galling now that getting from one place to another outdoors is so much easier—although progress is being made on systems that free people inside from the tyranny of wayfinding signage. I am eagerly anticipating the ready availability of these systems.

I do appreciate why some want us lost inside—perhaps we walk by more merchandise that they’re trying to sell, for instance—but when most of us are scurrying to appointments, etc, we don’t have time to dawdle and all that near aimless wandering is pointless. It just makes people stressed and puts them in a mood where their tunnel vision is even more restricted.

Being lost boils down to losing control.  When we’re unsure how to get where we’d like to be we’re out of control. Stress ensues. We get snappy. We can’t process information flowing into our brains as effectively (even if we get a clue about where we should be going); enough stress and the functioning of our immune system degrades.

Boosting wellbeing

Boosting user wellbeing by design is no longer an option. Clearly, indicating ways to get to needed locations in big buildings can contribute significantly to quality-of-life (an old-fashioned term for ‘wellbeing’) but is often either assumed to happen or an afterthought.

Studying how people move through existing spaces (or new ones via virtual reality or other simulations) when different sorts of signs, maps, and other similar displays are present would promote user flourishing (another hot topic now and, let’s face it, equivalent to wellbeing), especially for infrequent visitors.

The wellbeing czars of the workplace need to spring into action, moving indoor navigation into the same era as outdoor wayfinding.