Wayfinding

This is a photo of an elevator in a parking garage in Bloomington, IN. Is this necessary? was the first thing that came to mind. Donald Norman talks a lot about "reminders" in The Design of Everyday Things. I have a post-it note on my computer at work to remind me to clock-in everyday. We leave ourselves reminders all the time. But I'd never seen a reminder for a reminder. If the word remember hadn't  been there, I would have seen the giant number 1 and thought Okay, I'm on the first floor. But would I have used that information in the same way when it came time to find my car? Probably not. Simply having the number 1 on the door tells me where I am in that moment. Which has value but not as much as when it comes time to leave and I forgot where I parked. There's a different context with the word remember. This elevator is now a wayfinding artifact, not a general informative artifact.

An offshoot of information architecture is a practice called wayfinding, or the systematic organization and labeling for the navigation of discrete physical structures. It's mostly used in the urban planning and architecture disciplines and they largely go unnoticed (until you find yourself lost).

For the parking garage at the mall in Towson, Maryland, images of imaginary creatures were used to help patrons remember where they parked. Instead of using alphanumeric designations (ex. 2B) which might be easily forgotten, there are creatures like squid-bunnies and lion-turtles to demarcate each parking section. Unfortunately, the novelty of that system doesn't contextualize the information. Knowing that I'm in the lion-turtle section doesn't tell me why I should know that. And because I don't know why, I completely forget it the second I enter the mall.

The photo is a great example of how contextual information is and how important it is to define that context for the user's sake.