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The International Sign Association (ISA) had their annual conference and expo April 3-6 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. This year ISA made a concerted effort to reach out to designers and offer more educational sessions that specifically target designers and the issues they face in the world of environmental graphic design (EGD). Many of our SEGD colleagues and industry friends from leading EGD firms were represented: Gensler, Two Twelve Associates, Calori & Vanden-Eynden, and Studio SC to name a few.

I represented fd2s at the conference and, despite my general aversion to Las Vegas, had a great time! The quality and content of the seminars were well done and informational. Topics included incorporating BIM and Revit into design workflows, which seems great in theory, but has not been embraced by designers. We also discussed evidenced-based design – something I think all designers should embrace to shift decision-making from the subjective toward the objective. The speakers also did a good job of engaging their audience, with several wrapping up their talks with outstanding audience questions. A good sign – pardon the pun.

The exhibit hall was interesting even if there seemed to be a glut of large format printers and LED suppliers from China and Korea. There seemed to be few truly new fabrication techniques or products on display, but I nevertheless left with quite a few additional sources for products and services that I didn’t previously know about. This will make for a happy resource library back in the fd2s studio!

The expo hall and a number of the seminars afforded good opportunities to network with designers, fabricators, manufacturers and suppliers. In particular, it was great to connect with DG Studios, Babendure Design, 505 Designs and EMG to name just a few.

by Rick Smits

This most recent SXSW proved to be an exciting week, with energy and optimism that was palpable on every street corner. The Interactive Weekend really kicked off with the annual frogdesign opening party, which was touted as a social experiment of sorts.

Many major tech brands—such as Google, Blackberry, and Mashable—set up camp and lured visitors with exciting new products and services. Smaller social media startups offered grilled cheese sandwiches in exchange for proof of using their app (or evidence that you’ve at least downloaded it). These and other major brands also sponsored lunches, happy hours, and evening parties, the latter of which included free music and booze for badge holders and RSVPers.

For non-badge holders, there were plenty of unofficial SXSW things to see and do, such as public art installations, secret music shows, and speaker events that included a Pecha Kucha hosted with Pentagram’s parking lot as the venue. Speakers offered musically themed design talks, two of which included integration of a baby grand piano.

With many of the featured sessions posted online, people could catch whatever they missed (and visuals were often provided via Slideshare). This benefit even applied to badge-holders, who didn’t always get to see what they came for due to schedule conflicts and “sold out” auditoriums.

Central to the week’s showcase of technology, innovations, and ideas are the following questions. Are you excited about the new possibilities? How do you see them playing out in your everyday life as well as in emerging economies? How will we create more meaningful interactions among people and between people and intelligent connected devices? How will we improve our cities?

Gensler teamed up with Mass Relevance, Rand, and Stratus to ask, ”What would a redesigned Austin look like? Subsequent tweets were projected on a large screen installed on a facade of the W Hotel.

One session particularly relevant to us in wayfinding and EGD was delivered by fd2s alum Leslie Wolke and Jake Barton, founder and principal of Local Projects. They walked through a case study entitled “Change By Us,” an open-source application with its first project up and running for New York City. Another talk, which was previewed for us during  XLab in November, was Carina Ngai’s “Design for Aging“, in which she offered a methodology to “move us beyond usability and into a process of innovation.” Just how that process unfolds will be interesting to observe.

What other sessions did you find particularly relevant? Inspiring? Thought-provoking?

UAMS Donor Recognition Signage

Today we feature an excerpt from our Donor Recognition White Paper.

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At facilities ranging from hospitals and college campuses to performing arts centers and public sports complexes, administrators and fundraising teams are dealing with new challenges related to how donors should be recognized in the built environment.

These donor recognition challenges are closely related to broader, ongoing trends in the fundraising world, which include:

• Greater fundraising needs.
• Increased competition.
• More sophisticated donors.
• More elaborate campaigns.

All of these factors, along with enormous advances in the technology available for creating and maintaining donor recognition elements, are dramatically changing the way we acknowledge donors in the built environment. The days of the single bronze plaque in the building lobby are long gone, and its replacement is a complex, changing – and often technology-enhanced–assortment of recognition elements spread throughout a facility.

Not only are institutions asking these new elements to recognize more levels of donors, for more campaigns, in more places, they are also demanding that they entertain visitors, and encourage new donations by delivering compelling information about the institution’s mission and its existing donor base.

The purpose of this document is to help development professionals and facilities managers get a better feel for the issues surrounding the creation of an institution- or facility-wide donor recognition program, assemble the team and resources required to tackle these issues, and then take the first steps toward the development and implementation of a successful donor recognition strategy.

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To find out more about the way we think about the complexities of Donor Recognition, request a copy of our Donor Recognition White Paper.

fd2s completed the development of a tool to help healthcare administrators and staff determine the extent of wayfinding problems in their facilities.

The eight-page document consists of questions – divided into the categories of signage, printed materials, interactive tools, operations, and other – that are intended to both bring conspicuous issues into clearer focus, and also point out less obvious missed opportunities for improving the patient and visitor experience with better wayfinding.

Rather than serving as a “test” or “scorecard” with results that are quantifiable, but not actionable, the self-evaluation is designed to jump-start further discussions about the wayfinding challenges facing an institution, and shed light on possible solutions.

To request a free, no-obligation copy of the self-evaluation document in PDF form, please send an email with your name and contact information to Steve Stamper at sstamper@fd2s.com, or call 512.476.7733.

The principles of Building Information Modeling (BIM) are now being employed on almost all large, complex building construction and renovation projects, which means that the question of how BIM relates to the planning and design of wayfinding programs is coming up with increasing frequency these days.

Most wayfinding specialists, however, are still wrestling with the idea of what is practical, or even desirable, when it comes to incorporating wayfinding information into BIM. Because of this, we decided that it might be useful to talk briefly about what we see as the key limitations, and potential strengths, of BIM as it relates to wayfinding, and invite others to share their thoughts.

Read the rest of this entry »

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?