Street Smarts

By David Gibson

I'm sitting in the window of a restaurant in Chelsea looking out at the streetscape, reminiscing about a great little restaurant that used to sit across the street. Called Eighteenth and Eighth, it was a cozy place in a handsome early nineteenth-century brick row house. That building was a fragment of old New York. Alas it and its two neighbors have been replaced by an ugly bank that adds nothing to the neighborhood and looks like any bank anywhere.

The restaurant where I'm waiting for my friend is, for some reason, called Pounds and Ounces. The name of that now departed restaurant offered no more clue to the dining experience than the name of the place where I am now sitting. But its name did provide some important wayfinding information. It was called 18th and 8th and any seasoned Manhattanite could tell you in an instant where to find it - the corner of 18th Street and 8th Avenue of course.

In a city like New York, that kind of information is wayfinding gold, a great how-to-find-it cue. My reverie got me thinking about the role that street names play in the wayfinding process. In North America and many parts of the world, we rely on street names and building numbers to help us find a destination. Traditionally those names allowed us to use the gazetteer to find the street on a map and get ourselves headed in the right direction. That system works particularly well in Manhattan where the famed Commissioners plan of 1811 gave us the great numbered street grid that guided the development of the city for the next century and has made wayfinding in the borough a relatively easy and intuitive experience. In fact in any city, town or subdivision, the street names help us find the people and places we are looking for. The rapid growth of GPS and the widespread use of Google Maps reinforce this paradigm - if you've got an address you can find it. With a postal code and an address you can send a package or letter anywhere. It's a universal how-to-find-it language.

There are two kinds of places I can think of where this nifty system breaks down. In many parts of the world streets don't have defined and agreed upon names and buildings don't have address numbers. I have been working in the Middle East for the past year have discovered that Dubai is a place without such a system. As I found when trying to direct my taxi to a small neighborhood restaurant just off of Sheikh Zayed Road, this makes direction giving really challenging, particularly in a city of more than two million people. I'll talk more about navigation in Dubai in a subsequent post.

My wayfinding work on college campuses has highlighted for me the other situation where people navigate without addresses. On old college campuses like Princeton, most buildings aren't located on a street but rather on a quad or a green and maybe a walkway. With no obvious street address for most buildings, it can be difficult to direct people to many campus destinations. There are some ways around this. At Princeton the walks have developed as a kind of street grid and the major ones have been named for past university presidents. The wayfinding signs and maps we have created for Princeton will make the names of these walks more explicit and visible to those trying to find a building on campus. The walks become an alternative addressing system that people use both to give directions and to find their way.

For us, the design of wayfinding systems can be a process of creating mental mapping structures or frameworks upon which we can build a system of directions. With these wayfinding strategies, we can simplify navigation in complex places. It may not be as easy as the path to my old haunt 18th and 8th, but it is usually much simpler than the convoluted direction sets we encounter at institutions with no wayfinding system in place.