Placemaking & Wayfinding for A Better Sense of Wellbeing.
As designers and strategists that are focused wholeheartedly on improving the visitor experience, our role sees us working directly on creating spaces for people to use, consume and enjoy.
More often than not the impetus is on delivering design to improve the aesthetic values of a destination such as when we engage on public art programs and even placemaking.
There is, however, a bigger yet deeper picture to consider.
As the notion of wellness and humancentric design becomes more prevalent within the minds of employers and their employees, developers and their audiences need to firmly grasp the importance of moving beyond just GLA and aesthetics when they dream up their latest building or destination, and to really begin to take on a much more nuanced and holistic design and development philosophy that embraces the overarching need for end user and visitor health and wellbeing.
While the notion of wellness may be somewhat of a fashionable buzzword, there’s no doubt that taking wellbeing into consideration can have a significant commercial impact when executed correctly but this delicate balancing act – especially when it comes to workplace design for instance has probably never been more important than it is today as society continually seeks higher levels of work life balance.
This is where a holistic placemaking approach that blends Environmental Graphic Design (EGD) and wayfinding with purposeful wellness driven interior, landscape and architectural design can refocus the relationship between occupant and built environment.
The advent of the WELL Building Standards provides a catalyst to further discussion around design principles that can improve the overall wellbeing of people. WELL Building Standards are a performance-based system for measuring, certifying, and monitoring features of buildings that impact human health and wellness. These standards emphasize seven concepts, including air, light, fitness, comfort, nourishment, mind, and water.
At this point, it’s key to emphasize that EGD and improved navigation alone cannot close the loop on improving the overall wellness values of a building or space, however as these two areas of design are very much human centered and by their very nature highly visual, they can certainly make strong contributions in their own way at they often act as the final visual layer between visitor and environment making them critical elements when it comes to the manner in which people perceive and interact with their surroundings.
In fact, more often than not it is the ability or lack thereof for people to successfully navigate a space that determines whether or not it is viewed as a positive or negative experience. With that said, the integration of wellness and EGD with wayfinding can be transformative forces that contribute to creating spaces that foster wellness and enhance the human experience in a positive manner.
Wayfinding For Wellness.
Starting with wayfinding, its core purpose is to assist visitors of all types to better navigate and explore a destination, leading to greater levels of comfort and convenience for the user experience. If there’s one factor that can make or break a successful visitor journey its wayfinding, so for any wellness orientated environment, well thought-out and user-friendly navigation is a must. This helps to keep people on the right path and goes a long way to reduce anxiety and frustration, especially for first time or time pressed users of a destination.
Navigation anxiety is a real thing and you’ve probably felt it at one time or another, particularly in new or crowded places and probably when you’re in a rush to get somewhere. In big picture terms Navigation is an important everyday skill facilitating efficient and independent access to many activities of daily living, such as going to work, meeting friends at the cinema or searching the supermarket for ingredients. Of course, humans also use navigational skills to find our way around new places, learn the ‘best’ route to familiar locations and to retrace our paths back home. For visitors to new destinations like a large-scale mall or perhaps visiting a certain part of the city the ability to get there easily and find your way round conveniently and then get back home again is an innate need and when the system in place to facilitate the journey breakdown or don’t exist it cause a whole range of negative outcome such as frustration, anxiety and stress. This negative outcome due to poor wayfinding can directly impact our sense of wellbeing.
In the workplace, well incorporated wayfinding can help to disarm the visitor journey around a campus while contributing to improved motivation and productivity by helping to put the wellbeing of people first.
Irrespective of the destination, the overall visitor experience when wellness focused can then be enhanced through incorporating elements that for instance that promote physical activity such as providing graphic and visual cues to take the stairs instead of lifts, reduce stress through making time for mindful moments or by simply making your journey easier and more enjoyable through the creative use of graphics that can help annotate and define the journey in a variety of ways.
These visual gestures can then be reinforced through the adoption of thoughtful design attributes that are tailored towards creating a greater sense of wellbeing such as incorporating a more neutral color palette while still maintaining good contrast levels for legibility and readability to using softer forms that are more welcoming and less visually aggressive.
The Role of Environmental Graphic Design
Environmental Graphic Design (EGD) embraces various design disciplines, including graphic, architectural, interior, landscape, and industrial design, to shape the visual aspects of a built environment.
When it comes to integrating EGD with wellness to enhance the user experience there are a range of factors to contribute to the mission such as creating a sense of place, providing targeted interventions and gestures big or small and delivering thoughtful graphics and visual cues and messaging that aim to entertain, reflect, or simply make one smile.
Creating a stronger sense of place through positive storytelling has the potential to be transformative when it comes to providing mindful environments that cater towards fostering a positive mental attitude or at the least a more calming atmosphere that goes beyond workplace posters and slogans. What we are talking about here is a fully integrated and holistic approach that deliberately and purposefully blends an altruistic visual overlay with a wellness defined set of design principles that create well considered and harmonized spaces.
This in turn allows for improved occupant health and happiness catering to wide and diverse audience types that takes the varied needs of visitors into consideration along with their cognitive and accessible abilities thus ensuring wellness orientated environments are created to support diverse well-being.
From incorporating biophilic design elements and materials as a means to foster a greater sense of tranquility and connection to the natural world, to providing vastly improved shared and individual spaces supported by a focus on ergonomics across the built environment with factors that may include lighting, tonality, scale, contours and paths as well as taking into consideration visitors’ visual comfort through thoughtful information design to deliver higher levels of legibility and visual understanding, these combined measures all seek to disarm and engage occupants in more appealing way with a deeper human connection to the environment that they inhabit.
The Bottom Line:
The integration of WELL Standards and thoughtful placemaking, through the integration of environmental graphic design and wayfinding has the potential to foster an innovative design approach that complements aesthetic ambitions with occupant health and happiness. This intersection allows designers to help their clients create spaces that not only look good but also feel good, promoting wellness in the built environment.
This synergy marks a seismic shift in the way developers typically approach design and the future holds exciting prospects as more design professionals and their clients recognize the importance of wellness in the built environment. The convergence of WELL Standards and placemaking along with the adoption of recycled and green materials promises a future where design serves a greater purpose – positively impacting human health, sustainability, and happiness, which is an approach that we welcome.
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