Environmental Psychology and Wayfinding: When User Experience & Navigation worlds collide
Our environments are becoming more complex. Our spaces need to do more and be more for everyone who passes through them.
Recently, I’ve been toying with the idea of going back to school.
In my role as Director at ID-LAB, I’m privileged to work with my colleagues on some pretty amazing projects. We work with hospital directors to make sure people can find help faster. We create guidelines that provide clients with our thinking in plain language. We create environments that make sense.
But we’ve noticed something lately – complex environments are becoming more, well, complex. Our spaces need to do more and be more for everyone who passes through them. They need to be accessible, legible and flexible enough to allow decisions to be made by different users, while still achieving the same goal – finding the right way.
So, why was I thinking I may need to go back to school? Because I’ve noticed that these requirements are about more than wayfinding. They are about understanding the reasoning behind the choices we make, and the environments that assist us to make them.
As humans, we are highly influenced by our physical environment – it affects our behaviour, our emotions, and our overall well being. When it comes to architecture and design, how we respond to a space is reliant on a huge range of factors, many of which we are still grasping.
In response to this change, I’ve taken a dip into a world I’m both fascinated and (slightly) intimidated by – the world of environmental psychology.
What is environmental psychology?
Put simply, environmental psychology studies how our physical environments affect how we feel, behave and respond.
As someone in the business of creating environments which are intuitive, user-friendly and visually appealing, I was already an informed audience and knew what this area of knowledge might entail. As wayfinders, we’re familiar with how to use lighting, texture, colour, layout and signage to create navigable paths.
As wayfinders, we’re familiar with how to use lighting, texture, colour, layout and signage to create navigable paths. But environmental psychology adds more depth to these considerations.
But environmental psychology takes these considerations to a whole different level. There’s a different wayfinding game unfolding, and the old tricks aren’t going to cut it.
To create environments that work, we have to work with the changing environment. We have to consider how emerging technologies (e.g. digital wayfinding and virtual reality) are going to layer and enhance our theoretical knowledge and application. Similarly, we have to consider how users of differing abilities and cultural backgrounds can interact with a space and comprehend it.
The nature of environmental psychology lends itself to this type of thinking. What type is that, you might ask? An interdisciplinary one.
Combining the powers of environmental psychology & wayfinding
Wayfinding requires a cross-disciplinary practice. That’s why we have architects, designers and strategists as part of our core team.
That’s because wayfinding is both a physical and cognitive process. We need physical aspects to direct us including lighting, signage and landmarks. But for the wayfinding to work, we also need to consider the cognitive side, including mental mapping, decision-making, and memory. When these elements work in harmony, people can navigate their environments with greater ease.
But we’re keen to do more. We want actionable feedback, more continuous improvement and greater ability to create spaces that truly work and respond to users’ needs. To do this, we need to up our environmental psychology game.
By studying the factors that influence wayfinding, environmental psychology can provide us with more insights into how to improve the design of buildings, public spaces, and even cities, to enhance the experience for everyone.
Environmental psychology can assist us to enhance numerous things in our wayfinding and design practice. So much so that it’s quickly forming the future of wayfinding, and the future of ID-LAB.
Applying Environmental Psychology Principles to Improve Wayfinding
As always with anything ID-LAB-related, we’re about application, not just supposition.
My toe-dipping into environmental psychology turns out to be only the beginning. We’ll be announcing some pretty significant updates soon enough. But in the meantime, here’s my top four learnings from my flirtation with a new, yet strangely familiar, discipline:
Understanding environmental psychology will help us to design more legible spaces. The more we know what people need to know to navigate the space, the more easily we can design for that.
Technology is our friend, but only if we understand how to use it to improve everyone’s experience, especially in complex spaces.
Our wayfinding systems need to accommodate for differences in background and ability. To do this, we need to understand people’s expectations about environmental design, and how to work that through every stage of planning and development.
We need to become experts in environmental psychology. If we can put the comprehension of the human perspective first, the application that follows will be more holistic, positive, and importantly for us, beautiful to experience.