fd2s Blog

The City of New York recently opened up access to a slew of public data sources via its NYC Data Mine, and is sponsoring a competition to encourage developers to create web and mobile applications that utilize this data. All of the applications can be found on the NYC BigApps web site, and the winners will be announced on February 4.

As you would expect, there were quite a few entries with wayfinding or mapping functionality, for everything from locating dog parks to touring historic homes. Here are a couple of the most interesting:

UpNext 3D NYC

UpNext 3D NYC is an iPhone app that uses city GIS data and building perimeter outlines to create an interactive 3D map of New York.

In addition to providing a very detailed and clear 3D view (much more accurate than what you get with Google Earth, for example), the application also provides detailed information about subway stations and routes, and can provide the locations of nearby bars, restaurants, and other businesses, as well as parks, bike racks, and events.

WayFinder NYC

WayFinder NYC is an augmented reality application for Android phones that helps users to find New York subway and New Jersey Path stations. The user just aims the phone as if they were taking a picture, and the application indicates subway and PATH stations in that direction. When the user faces another direction, the list of stations will change accordingly.

By clicking on a station name, the user can get a map and walking directions to that station.

Ride the City

It appears that Ride the City existed before the BigApps competition, and it is also has versions for other cities, but is still eligible for the competition because it utilizes the City of New York’s LION centerline data.

The application delivers Google-Maps-style turn-by-turn directions for cyclists. It avoids busy roadways, and directs cyclists to bike lanes/paths where they are available. It is also aware of elevation changes, and recommends flatter routes when appropriate.

The application also has a fairly comprehensive database of bike shops, which are indicated on the route maps.

PrimoSpot

PrimoSpot uses the city’s parking facilities database to help drivers navigate New York’s notoriously difficult parking landscape. The application, available for the iPhone and Android devices, provides locations for garages, street parking, and bike racks, searchable by proximity to the user’s location.

For garages, the application includes information about parking rates, and for spots on the street there are detailed parking regulations, including special notations for spots that – based on the current time – are about the become legal parking spaces. Google StreetView integration helps users to find garages, and the application can even record were a user parked, making it easy to find their car or bicycle later.

BigMapple

While getting a little further from a true wayfinding application, BigMapple does offer some interesting map-related functionality.

One of several applications that take information from the city’s various event databases and display it on a map provided by the Google API, BigMapple adds another interesting element. It displays clickable icons for recent Twitter updates and Flickr uploads from the geographic area shown on the map.

While the current volume of Tweets and images is low, it is easy to imagine how these could work with the event listings to provide a nice overview of things happening around a neighborhood if the application takes off.

If you have experience with any of these applications, or see others in the BigApps gallery that look interesting, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Dr. Bridget Duffy, who was formerly the Chief Experience Officer at the Cleveland Clinic, is one of a handful of people who are truly focused on all aspects of the patient experience, and she has some great ideas about what is wrong with the way patients, hospitals, and doctors relate to one another in our healthcare system. We previously featured a video of a brief interview with her at the 2007 Consumer-Centric Healthcare Congress.

In this new video, recorded at the Gel Health Conference last month in New York, she relates some of her own experiences as a patient with a broken leg, and then discusses her ideas for redesigning the healthcare system by listening to the voice of the patient.

The presentation doesn’t include anything directly related to wayfinding, and it is much heavier on anecdotes than specific data or recommendations, but if you you work regularly in hospitals you will certainly find some inspiration here, as well as a renewed sense of what the end users of our work are facing as they navigate both the physical hospital environment and the emotional issues surrounding their own illness.

There is a small but growing community of people on Twitter who are interested in wayfinding and environmental graphic design, so I thought it might be useful to share a list of some of the people I have recently run across who are tweeting regularly on the topic.

Compared to the fields of web development and traditional graphic design, from each of which you could easily put together a list of 100 designers who are heavy users of Twitter, the highly specialized world of wayfinding and environmental graphic design still has a relatively small footprint on the microblogging service. This means that this list is somewhat ragtag, with a combination of individuals, companies, publications, and organizations. And most of them aren’t cranking out 50 tweets a day. All of them, however, do manage to regularly share links to wayfinding-related news from around the web, as well as information about new projects, events, and even interesting products.

SEGD (@SEGD)

You’re probably already familiar with the Society for Enviromental Graphic Design, “the global community of people working at the intersection of communication design and the built environment.” Their steady Twitter stream is a nice mix of industry news and organization-specific information.

Arrows and Icons (@ArrowsAndIcons)

Arrows and Icons is a recently launched online magazine for environmental graphic design. The web site is still in its infancy, but they are very active on Twitter, retweeting a lot of wayfinding-related items and tracking down new material as well. Editor Ryan Lascano also tweets as @ryanlascano.

Mark Vanderklipp (@corbinprez)

Mark Vanderklipp is the president of Corbin Design, a wayfinding and EGD firm based in Traverse City, Michigan. Other Corbin staffers on Twitter include @rick_stringer and @geneullerysmith.

Sander Baumann (@designworkplan)

Sander Baumann is an Amsterdam-based designer and editor of the DesignWorkPlan blog. He tweets regularly about wayfinding, typography, and the intersection of the two.

Ricardo Hernandez (@rockerdesign)

Ricardo Hernandez is a visual communication and branded environments professional based in Washington, DC.

Wayfinding (@Wayfinding)

Ah yes, the mysterious @Wayfinding. Their Twitter profile offers no clue of their true identity, other than that they live in Toronto, but they do manage to generate pretty interesting tweets on a regular basis.

Amy Rees (@amayarees)

Amy Rees is a Senior Associate at MERJE Design at Philadelphia. She tweets regularly about EGD-related topics, particularly exhibit design. @kelbennett is another MERJE staffer on Twitter.

fd2s (@fd2s)

Of course I would be remiss if I didn’t mention our own Twitter presence. Not a high volume of tweets, but I do try to share a mix of fd2s updates, wayfinding-related news that I find on the web, and links to other things that are happening in the industry.

I hope that this list is a offers a good starting point for Twitter newcomers interested in wayfinding, or regular Twitter users looking to increase their involvement in the discussion about wayfinding and environmental graphic design. If you have other recommendations or ideas, feel free to speak up in the comments.

The frenetic pace of the conference continued on Thursday with nearly 20 presentations, demos and panels. A couple highlights:

• Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap spun a yarn about “ubiquitous geocontext.” He took us through an imaginary day in the not so distant future when our everyday interactions are encoded with geographic information and networked to share that information. For example, your car may “know” that when your gas tank is less than a quarter tank full, it should “look” for the least expensive gas available along your route, select the most efficient detour, and direct you to it. Your car may also alert you that Fred is offering to pay $10 to share a ride to work with you and that the detour required to pick him up would only take 5 minutes. Your appliances — such as your car, phone, calendar — will collaborate to perform realtime cost-benefit analysis based on your location, what you want to do, and where you are headed. None of these activities are difficult computing problems to solve, but they do require that geocontextual information is standardized (which it already is) and freely available (which much of it is not.) That’s the case for OpenStreetMap, a crowd-sourced repository of geographic information that is rivalling the more closed and/or proprietary data owned by Navteq and GeoAtlas. Think of it as Wikipedia for maps. Much of the informal conversation at the conference delved into the tautologies of “how open is an open API” and how closed is a black box.
• Bruce Daniel of Cartifact Labs spoke lyrically about the beauty of maps. He presented Cartifact’s maps of New York and Los Angeles: a clean, current base map with an interactive lens. As you sweep the lens over an area you can display maps of that area drafted in the 1800s. See for yourself at maps.cartifact.com.

This week I am participating in “Where 2.0,” a conference that focuses on innovations in “the geospatial web” — an ever-broadening category of technologies that utilize location information in some way. By grounding data (often literally) to its physical location on the planet, software can monitor, visualize, analyze, and even predict a mind-boggling variety of results.

While I was eager to learn about the latest crop of location-based services, such as applications for mobile phones and mapping technologies, I could not have imagined the extent to which the intersection of web technologies, GPS, and mobile phones has electrified the entrepreneurial and research communities. Here are just a few reports that represent the breadth of yesterday’s discussions.

• MIT MediaLab professor Sandy Petland introduced us to “Reality Mining” — the pursuit of understanding how organizations work by analyzing who’s talking to whom and who’s out of the loop. One could study the flow of information through a company by tracking email volleys, but he found it much more insightful to analyze in-person meetings by monitoring location and route data of employees. (Research made possible by RFID and other location-sensing devices.) Organizations with more formal and informal in-person interactions were more productive. What does that say about tele-commuting?
• Glympse announced their mobile application with the grammarian’s nightmare of a tagline: “Share your where.” The application allows you to share your location and real-time route with anyone you choose to, for as long as you choose to. The application tracks your route and sends updates to email/phone to the people you allow to monitor your route. See Bob Tedeschi’s review of the product in today’s New York Times.
• Two products are in the running for “coolest demo” — I leave it to you to choose: Joker Racer, a remote-controlled car via WiFi and over the internet that was described for the geeky audience as a “drivable linux server” or Velodyne’s Lidar, a sensor that uses 64 lasers to capture real-time surroundings in three dimensions — used by automatically-driven vehicles, the U.S. military and Radiohead.

What on earth (forgive the pun) will today’s sessions bring?

In January, I had the pleasure of touring the tremendous exhibits at the California Academy of Sciences. I interviewed the designers of the exhibits as well as their peers at the Academy for an article that has just been published in segdDesign, the quarterly magazine of the SEGD. Here’s a bit from the introduction:

Imagine receiving the following creative brief:

“Collaborate with a Pritzker Prize winning architect, evolutionary biologists and ecologists, and the staff of a 157-year-old acclaimed research institution to create a new generation of sustainable exhibition design for a space bathed in natural light and without walls, in the middle of Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.”

This was the challenge that brought together Jonathan Katz, founder and CEO of Cinnabar, a Los Angeles-based production and fabrication company, and Adam Brodsley, principal and co-founder of Volume Inc., a multi-disciplinary design studio in San Francisco. Katz, Brodsley, and a bevy of designers and exhibit specialists produced two main attractions for the new home of the California Academy of Sciences, the 412,000-sq.-ft. LEED Platinum museum that is transforming the definition of that word by its very being.

If you would like to read the article, download the pdf and post your thoughts below. (Above is a photo of a great quote from one of the exhibits – couldn’t find a way to work it into the article!)

I have been getting a lot of inquiries lately about touch-screen wayfinding kiosks, and it occurred to me that there might be some interest in this video, which demonstrates the kiosk component of the “Access” wayfinding program that fd2s created for the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Center in Houston.

You can get more information about the overall Access wayfinding program, which also included signage, architectural elements, printed materials, and staff training, in the fd2s web site’s M.D. Anderson Case Study. If that’s not enough, an even more detailed description of the project is available on our special Access Microsite.

When towns or cities recognize they have a wayfinding need – usually because they discover that visitors are constantly lost or that potentially popular visitor destinations are being underutilized – their first inclination is to install more signs. This is not surprising of course, since wayfinding is, after all, the practice of helping people to find their way, and signage is the field’s most obvious, long-standing tool.

But while signage may be an important part of the solution, taking such a narrow view of both the objectives and parameters of a wayfinding program will severely limit its potential benefits. An effective wayfinding program will actually consider much more than just signage, and if done correctly, it will have benefits that go far beyond simply helping people find their destination. A holistic approach to wayfinding will look at every possible point of contact with a user of the system, from the time they begin contemplating and planning their journey until they reach their final destination. The result will be something more than just great wayfinding. It will actually play a leading role in shaping the overall experience of visitors, which is a critical component of a strong, valuable brand.

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A few months ago, in a post about the 2008 Healthcare Design Conference, I mentioned some annual healthcare-related conferences for people interested in facility design. Since then, I have been wanting do a more comprehensive list of organizations that promote better healthcare design, and that have at least some interest in the role that wayfinding can play in improving the patient experience.

If you are a healthcare architect or facility manager who isn’t already familiar with all of these organizations, you should definitely give them a close look. And if you’re a wayfinding professional looking to develop a better understanding of how concepts such as family-centered care, patient satisfaction, and evidence-based design are shaping the environment at healthcare facilities, these groups are a great place to start.

1. The Center for Health Design

The Center for Health Design is the most active and robust of the organizations listed here. They are the driving force behind the annual Healthcare Design conference, which is the premier event for people interested in healthcare facility design, and they are also the creators of the Pebble Project, which is documenting the financial and quality-of-care benefits of better facility design, and the Evidence Based Design Accreditation & Certification program.

This is also the organization that gives the most attention to wayfinding, and seems to best understand both the impact that wayfinding can have on the patient experience, and amount of strategic thinking that goes into the development of a truly effective wayfinding program. They regularly feature presentations on wayfinding at the Healthcare Design conference, and have included the subject in many of their educational and research materials.

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As mentioned in Leslie’s recent post about delivering better wayfinding information online, we are big fans of Google Maps and the wayfinding-related things you can do with the Google API.

Now New York City and Google have partnered to create a web site (www.nycgo.com) and information center (at 810 Seventh Avenue) that use Google’s latest technology and information offerings to inform and direct city visitors.

The site has some great features and a lot of content, but the most interesting thing about this project may be the touch screens in the information center, which are demonstrated in this video.