99% Invisible - 126- Walk This Way

Episode Date: August 5, 2014

As humans have developed cities and built environments, we have also needed to develop ways to find our way through them. Sam Greenspan went on a wayfinding tour with Jim Harding in the Atlanta airport. Harding is one of the … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 2005, I took a job at WBEZ in Chicago, and I was so excited to be moving there. I was excited about the job, of course, but I was also very excited about the grid. The streets of Chicago and the address numbering system are beautiful.

Starting from the 00 access point downtown, the streets conform to a rigid grid pattern where the major streets are exactly one mile apart and have address numbers which are in multiples of 800. You don't really have to be able to picture this, but I know that if you know it, you're nodding your head vigorously, but just know that it's amazing and I was mesmerized by it. So much so that I made flashcards with Chicago Street names on one side, and the corresponding address number on the other so that my wife and I could quiz ourselves on the 2,000-mile road trip from San Francisco to Chicago. Yes, I was always like this.

Division is 1200 North. Armourtage is 2000 North, and therefore one mile north of division. After living in the jungle of San Francisco streets for years, the thought of moving to a place where people plan the city to help people know where they were and where they were going sooth my lizard brain and gave me peace. and gave me peace. As humans have developed cities and built environments, we have also needed to develop ways to find our way through them. Signage goes back at least as far as the Roman Empire.

They constructed milestones along their roadways. Which is to say, if you're relying on anything besides natural features to help you find your way around, you are relying on things made by people whose job it is, is to help us figure out how to get from all of our respective point A's to our point B's. Our producer Sam Greenspan would like me to tell you that he has a fantastic sense of direction. I really do. I get lost some times all of a minute.

It's the worst. I get lost some times, I'll admit it. It's the worst. I get so mad at myself when it happens. But now, my life is completely different ever since I started thinking about what it means that wayfinding is a thing. Wayfinding, in this sense, is a branch of environmental graphic design, concerned with helping people find their way. I love knowing this, because now, when I get lost in a hospital or in a complicated freeway

interchange or at an airport, I have someone to blame. Yeah, that's one way to look at it, but a lot of times it has nothing to do with the signage. You can use an error or does a plot sometimes. Fair enough, let me introduce you to Jim Harding. My name is Jim Harding. I'm an environmental graphic designer. Basically, I tell people where to go.

There's an environmental graphic designer or wayfinder, or maybe just a kid with a magic marker, behind every sign. Turn here to merge onto the 101. Concoursey is this way. Bathrooms straight ahead. But there is a lot, lot more to way finding than just signage. Signage is probably the least effective tool of wayfinding. Good architecture is one of the best. It's not that Jim hates signs. Rather the best forms of

wayfinding are, shall we say, invisible. They're baked into the built environment. I first heard about Jim Harding through a writer named David Zweig. I'm David Zweig, I'm a writer. My book is called Invisible, the power of anonymous work in an age of relentless self-promotion. David's Wig's book is a series of portraits of people whom he refers to as Invisible. Invisible are people who are highly skilled professionals, people who are really important to whatever enterprise or endeavor that they're a part of, that their work really has a big effect on the overall outcome, but yet who are largely unknown, never thought of by the public or the end user. Jim Harding, director of Environmental Graphics for Aggression Smith and Partners, is one

such invisible. Jim Harding is one of the best in the business. Jim worked on the new international terminal at Hartfield Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, Georgia, the world's busiest. 100 million passengers move through it every year, all of them needing to know where to go. Scylons are so important, because if you can see your destination, you don't have to rely on signs. I met Jim at the Atlanta Airport, and he walked me through some of the cutting edge wayfinding techniques that he employed at the new international terminal.

Like right when you walk in from curbside, the physical space tells you everything you need to know about how to move through it, without even realizing it. Let's start with the first thing you want when you enter the airport, the ticket counter. You're not lined up on a 90 degree access, they're angled, okay? A lot of times the ticket counter just meets you head on when you walk in and then you're left to wonder Okay, I go left or right, where's the sign for my gate? But these angled ticket counters subtly push you in the right direction. The angle Steers you down and around the ticket counter and heading toward the security checkpoint. As the counter is pushing you

You're also getting pulled by this giant three-story glass window that looks out onto the tarmac. You see planes, you see the apron, the jet way where the planes are parking, and so intuitively you're drawn to your planks. That's what you want to go. You want to get on that plane, right? And there are less obvious cues too, like the tile pattern in the floor. Absolutely. When you see the grid, instead of being on a 90 degree axis, it's on a 45. And these tiles going off at a 45 degree angle, they just beckon you to follow them. And so if you do that, you inevitably head toward security. But there's even more going on in the floor than that. And here's where this gets a little

bananas. You turn around and look back here, Sam. You see where the black starts at the door from the curb side. There's another set of tiles inside the dominant grid pattern that I didn't even notice at first. It starts black and then it's joined by a set of yellow goldish tiles that kind of cleaves out this corridor of negative space, which cuts straight through the hall going directly to security.

I've already had my ticket, I'm not checking any bags. I don't need to check in on it in the counter. I just follow the yellow brick road, so to speak. I follow the yellow brick road. It's amazing. That's exactly what it is, the yellow brick road. That's exactly what this is. The little white bowl.

Yeah. It's clicking on, yeah. It's pretty cool. And all of this Jim says is 100% intentional. Absolutely. Our interior designers went through a number of flooring, patterned design schemes until we arrived at this one. On the other side of security, we enter what Jim Harding calls the transition hall. Here's where a traveler has some decisions to make, whether it's to find to get here or whether

to get to another concourse, you take a subway called the plane train for that, or whether to head to baggage claim. This is the part where passengers are going to be asking themselves. Where am I? Where am I going? How do I know the best way to get there? Jim says that in these places, where there are decisions to be made, this is where way finding is needed the most. You have the visual way finding which is the signage.

You know, you can see it, you can read it, you can interpret it, find your way around. There's also an information desk and a newfangled interactive display. I walk with Jim towards the gates. Here's F7, F9, so it looks like the odds are on the left. All right, you're into the wayfinding the scene there. This concourse is pretty streamlined, elegant even, but at older, less well-designed concourses, which are definitely present at some other parts of the ATL Airport, this is where you'd find yourself in a visual morass.

You've seen this before, neon signs and brightly colored displays, all trying to get you to buy magazines or neck pillows or hot dogs. You have advertising, you have concessions, marketing, all those visual elements compete with the primary message of just how to navigate the airport. And so the key here is to make the signage stand out by being dull and drab and plain. Yeah, it's very neutral. It's a neutral palette gray and white basically. So you can spot the signs just by tuning out all the glitz.

Now even though this new international terminal is fairly minimal, there are still people trying to sell you stuff. Just beyond the transition hall towards the gates, there's this two level commerce area. There's shopping at ground level and then up and escalator are some food options. And of course it's all angled perfectly so you have a direct line of sight into all the shops as you're walking by. Is that an intentional design to have the shopping down below in the food up above? Yes.

Why is that? Well, more curb appeal for your retail tenants. If they're hungry, they're going to go find the food wherever it is, right? Well, here's the airport. It's a struggle to generate revenue. Really? Yeah. And so anything they can do to help increase non-aeronautical revenue, things that are not generated by a plane or an airline, so improving their concessions and retail, you know, they get a percentage of all those sales. And

that's when I realize why there are people like Jim Harding who are paid to do this work. It's not just that airports want us to have a pleasant experience, it's because there's money on the table. Think about it. Say you're trying to make a connecting flight, you don't have a lot of time, you don't only know where you're going. I'm stressed, and I don't think I'm going to catch my flight. Am I going to take time to open my wallet?

Heck no. But if I'm cool, calm, collected, if I'm my gait, I know where I'm going, I'm more likely to stop and buy whatever. So that's where Wayfinding has a real financial impact to an airport's bottom line. And so it turns out Wayfinding isn't just about helping you figure out how to get where you want to go. It's about steering the masses anywhere that companies hiring the wayfinders want the masses to be steered.

And what's more, if your consumer choices aren't going to make money for the powers that be inside of a closed system like an airport, don't plan on them making it easy for you. David's Wig, the writer who introduced me to Jim Harding, he noticed this kind of thing too. Their job isn't always about creating the best system for us, the traveler, sometimes it's who's paying their bills. When I flew to Florida with my family,

we flew into Fort Lauderdale, and we foolishly chose an off-site car rental company. Oh, rookies. Yeah, big mistake. We thought like, oh off-site, it's like you take a shuttle bus, you're there in two minutes. Well, what happened is, when you arrive there, there's huge signs for Hertz and Avis and all the companies who are there. If you're trying to find the off-site car rental companies, good luck.

And then if you try doing that with two little kids in tow, woof. David mentioned this to Jim Harding. They said, Jim, this seems like a wayfinding failure. And he said, well, the airport is far more interested in helping out the people who are paying them, who have on-site facilities. They have no incentive to have you leave the airport

to go to someone else. They generate no revenue. Yeah, so there's almost like second-class citizen. Yeah. That's not to say though that there's necessarily a dichotomy between capitalism and good user experience. Why do we do what we do for living as way funders? And I think it is, you know, in our own little way

to improve overall quality of life, that customer experience, passenger experience. And so you work on a project like the International Terminal here in Atlanta, you work on it for years. And after all that time, it's built. And you get to walk through it, and you see it like we are today. You see people using the space, understanding the space. They aren't stressed or freaking out about missing a flight.

And it's like, okay, wow, you know, it all works. We did a good job and you just come away with a nice sense of satisfaction. Welcome aboard the plane train. Please hold on, this train is departing. In theory, wavefinding should work whether you're literate in it or not. But learning to see the subtle wavefinding cues in the boat landscape can help you understand how you make your decisions. Or it can make you question if you're the one even making your own decisions at all.

After I parted ways with Jim Harding, I passed a food court, and I noticed right outside in the floor were these big black curvy tiles, and they actually seemed to be steering people towards the concessions. So you know, next time you find yourself at an airport food court eating a cinnabon that you didn't even want, check out the signage, the shape of the tiling, the height of the ceiling, the quality of the light. It may just be that you have an environmental graphic designer to blame. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know, user error does apply. But you know,, Avery Trouffleman, and me Roman Mars.

We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced out of the offices of ArcSign. Our favorite architecture firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You could only listen to these episodes of 99% of visible MBJS 5. But if you want to be ath-level 99PI Paladin, you should follow us on Twitter. We're at Roman Mars, Sam Lissons, Katie Mingle, and Trouffleman, live show and office hours' announcements

can be found most reliably on Facebook. We're also all over Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, SoundCloud, and Spotify too. And you're always welcome at our home on the web at 99PI.org. I'm buying a synopon at the airport that I arrived at. You understand why that's extra disgusting, right? you