Our Thinking: Designing the invisible
When I started training to be a designer, I set out wanting to work on things that would help others and, ideally, put something positive into the world. If someone told me I could get there by becoming a wayfinder designer, I would have asked the same question many people do when I tell them about my work, that being “Wait, what is wayfinding design?”
Most people may encounter the word ‘design’ and immediately think it means to make things look good. That’s definitely part of what I do, but good design is about more than making things pretty. It is about problem-solving, decision-making, and testing, testing and testing again. It’s also about imagination, making what can be envisioned possible. It’s about laying out a plan and seeing it through to something that is, at least most of the time, obviously visible. Except when it comes to wayfinding.
Generally, the design goal is to have something stand out. The choices we make should elevate a part of a space, define a brand, and pop out of the page. Great design of this kind brings something beautiful into the world, but it doesn’t necessarily go beyond the surface level of eye-catching aesthetics. Wayfinding, especially when done well, aims to achieve the very opposite of other types of design – it strives to go unnoticed.
Wayfinding should be an easy dance between the user and the space they encounter. It should subtly yet definitively let the user know where they are, where they need to be, and how they’re going to get there. The aesthetic appeal is there in the forms we choose and the environmental elements we work with, but its power is also in its function. For wayfinding design to work well, it has to look and feel harmonious. It has to look like it has always been there. And it has to survive the test of time, often for decades or generations to come.
That’s the true beauty of the work I get to do. It’s invisible, like the air we breathe or the cells that make up our body. As Antoine de Saint Exupery put it in his famous text ‘The Little Prince’, “...what is essential is invisible to the eye”. While we may not always get it right, what we set out to do as wayfinding designers at ID-LAB is to make something that is beautiful, but also functional.
Since starting at ID-LAB, I feel I’m accomplishing what I set out to do as a designer by working with what isn’t visible. I sense it when someone can walk into a hospital and feel their anxiety lift. Or when they can look around an airport and know exactly where their flight will leave from. Most of all, I feel I’m starting to succeed in this work when I can elevate someone’s experience, alleviate their stress, and help them find their way.