- Guest arti­cle by Hay­ley Branston — Wayfinding_UK

‘Defin­ing a City — How an informed choice of mate­ri­als can influ­ence a design and define the val­ues of a City’, an event by the Sign Design Society.

On Wednes­day 31st March Ivan Ben­nett, Design Manger for Lon­don Buses, deliv­ered a pre­sen­ta­tion on the design and devel­op­ment of Bus infra­struc­ture fur­ni­ture and prod­ucts at Trans­port for London’s offices in South­wark. This arti­cle gives and overview of the evening and high­lights some of the key top­ics discussed.

Back­ground Information

As part of Trans­port for Lon­don (TfL), Lon­don Buses is respon­si­ble for secur­ing the pro­vi­sion of bus ser­vices through­out Greater Lon­don in a safe, effi­cient man­ner, while encour­ag­ing the use of buses and pub­lic trans­port. Sur­face Trans­port Infra­struc­ture Devel­op­ment are respon­si­ble for the design and devel­op­ment, spec­i­fi­ca­tion, instal­la­tion and main­te­nance of the sup­port­ing infra­struc­ture within Greater Lon­don. As the main point of con­tact with pas­sen­gers, bus stops in Lon­don cur­rently total over 19,000.

Intro­duc­tion

Mike Wolff, Chair­man of the SDS, intro­duced Ivan and high­lighted that the soci­ety often dis­cuss the graphic design and strat­egy of wayfind­ing sys­tems, but talk less about the design of prod­ucts. That in mind he was very keen to get the event underway.

Lon­don Buses — The Facts

Ivan began his pre­sen­ta­tion by putting the scale of the Lon­don Bus project into per­spec­tive. Every week­day over 6,500 sched­uled buses carry around 6.25 mil­lion pas­sen­gers on over 700 dif­fer­ent routes, amount­ing to over 1.7 bil­lion jour­neys a year. He was also keen to point out that the first use of the iconic roundel was the 19th-century sym­bol of the Lon­don Gen­eral Omnibus Com­pany; its usage on the Under­ground came later.

His­tory of Lon­don Buses
Illus­tra­tions of old shel­ters showed how lit­tle the iden­tity had changed over the years and demon­strated how for­ward think­ing Lon­don were in a period hung up on embell­ish­ment. Ivan empha­sised the impor­tance and influ­ence of Frank Pick, head of the Lon­don Under­ground in the 1910s and 1920s and of the newly merged Lon­don Trans­port in the 1930s. Frank was instru­men­tal in estab­lish­ing the world’s most pro­gres­sive pub­lic trans­port sys­tem and an exem­plar of design man­age­ment. Ivan went on to explain how Frank’s vision influ­enced the design of Lon­don bus prod­ucts, includ­ing those we see on the streets today.

Cre­at­ing Suc­cess­ful Prod­ucts
TfL are a well known brand and the legacy of their prod­ucts has a huge impact on defin­ing the city. Their prod­ucts and use of mate­ri­als also help define the val­ues of the sys­tem. Ivan iden­ti­fied his three intrin­sic fac­tors for cre­at­ing suc­cess­ful products:

• Aes­thet­ics
• Appro­pri­ate­ness
• Eco­nom­ics

Even in the early 19th cen­tury, Lon­don Trans­port realised the impor­tance of these values.

“The test of the good­ness of a thing is its fit­ness for use. If it fails on this first test, no amount of orna­men­ta­tion or fin­ish will make it bet­ter; it will only become more expen­sive and more fool­ish.” — Frank Pick

It was clear that Ivan and his team design prod­ucts with a clear focus on ‘Appro­pri­ate­ness’. They adopt a cra­dle to grave approach to design and Ivan listed key con­sid­er­a­tions in their design process:

• Who will use the product?
• What will the prod­uct be used for?
• How long does the prod­uct need to last?
• What pos­si­ble impact does the prod­uct need to with­stand? (vehi­cles, pedes­tri­ans, weather)
• How often will the prod­uct need to be updated?
• How will the prod­uct be maintained?

In par­tic­u­lar when look­ing at materials:

• Do the indi­vid­ual mate­ri­als pro­posed work together?
• Are the mate­ri­als used sustainable?
• Do the mate­ri­als work within the sur­round­ing environment?
• What is the life span of indi­vid­ual materials?
• How will mate­ri­als be dis­posed of at the end of the prod­ucts life?

Cur­rent Prod­uct
Using a full scale replica of a bus stand located at the front of the room, Ivan described in detail the design of the cur­rent prod­uct used at bus stops.

Click to enlarge the busstop details.

Many of the com­po­nents are eas­ily switch­able. Ivan demon­strated how using a tiling sys­tem, bus stop num­bers could be changed and moved almost like pieces of a jig­saw puzzle.

Exam­ples of timeta­bles, route maps and net­work maps helped show how Lon­don Buses have sim­pli­fied infor­ma­tion to make it eas­ier for bus stop users to answer three key questions:

• Where am I now?
• How do I get from A to B
• How will I know when I get there?

Click to enlarge the map busstop details.

A good exam­ple of this sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of infor­ma­tion is the timetable, where indi­vid­ual times have been omit­ted and instead only first and last buses are listed along with the gen­eral fre­quency of buses through­out the day.

Exam­ple: Trans­port for Lon­don Jour­ney Plan­ner.

Where other sys­tems fail
One rea­son other sys­tems have failed is the lack of con­ti­nu­ity. Lon­don bus stops extend beyond cen­tral areas and cover all routes in Greater Lon­don. Ivan indi­cated that pas­sen­gers do not just want infor­ma­tion about where they are trav­el­ling from, but when they get there, they need the same con­sis­tently pre­sented infor­ma­tion. Peo­ple need infor­ma­tion near their homes and local areas, not just in the cen­tre of the city.

Ivan also pointed out that many sys­tems fail because they do not own their prod­ucts. Lon­don Buses design and build their prod­ucts and own the intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights. This allows TfL the free­dom to change man­u­fac­tur­ers with­out hav­ing to rein­vent their prod­ucts. Con­ti­nu­ity of the brand is main­tained and Lon­don Buses can con­tin­u­ally work on evolv­ing their products.

Ques­tions and Answers
The ses­sion con­cluded with a ques­tions and answers forum. Unsur­pris­ingly many of the ques­tions focussed on man­u­fac­tur­ing meth­ods and mate­r­ial choices, but sev­eral of the ques­tions were cen­tred around brand iden­tity and the roundel. A debate began on the use of the roundel and whether overuse was dilut­ing its visual impact, a sub­ject I am sure we all could have con­tin­ued dis­cussing at length, but time was push­ing on and Mike sadly had to draw the ses­sion to a close.

Con­clu­sion

I have been to sev­eral events organ­ised by the SDS, but this was one of my favourites. The pre­sen­ta­tion was filled with facts, his­tory, illus­tra­tions and phys­i­cal exam­ples. Ivan is obvi­ously very knowl­edge­able on the sub­ject and pas­sion­ate about his job and this came through in his presentation.

I would like to thank Ivan, Mike, Michelle and the SDS for another great event.

• For more infor­ma­tion on the SDS visit: The Sign Design Society

Author Bio:
Hay­ley grad­u­ated in 2007 with a first class degree in Visual Com­mu­ni­ca­tion. She now lives and works in Lon­don as a Wayfind­ing Designer for a large archi­tec­tural prac­tice. Her key projects to date include devel­op­ing sig­nage and infor­ma­tion graph­ics for both Dublin and Rome Air­port. Hayley’s thoughts and inspi­ra­tions can be found in her reg­u­lar tweets as Wayfinding_UK.