From 3 — 11 of Decem­ber 2009 IIID and The Sign Design Soci­ety orga­nized a 9 day sem­i­nar on sig­nage and wayfind­ing in Vienna, Aus­tria. I was lucky enough to attend the sem­i­nar day on Fri­day the 4th with the topic: City Iden­tity & Wayfind­ing.

This arti­cle will fea­ture a review of the sem­i­nar day with world lead­ing speak­ers on sig­nage and wayfind­ing such as Jim Northover, Tim Fend­ley, Nic Banks, Matt But­ters, Cliff Sel­bert and David Gib­son. In total on this day there were 16 speak­ers with pre­sen­ta­tions on: City wayfind­ing, Air­port sig­nage, Metro wayfind­ing, Envi­ron­men­tal graphic design, Typog­ra­phy, Pic­togram design, and much more, a sem­i­nar marathon so to say.

The pur­pose of sign09 is to bring together and inform those involved in the dis­ci­pline, to offer edu­ca­tion and net­work­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties and to improve aware­ness of the social and com­mer­cial impor­tance of this often under­es­ti­mated aspect of envi­ron­men­tal design.

Sign09 Vienna

This 9 days of sem­i­nar is a joined ini­tia­tive of Inter­na­tional Insti­tute for Infor­ma­tion Design (IIID) and Sign Design Soci­ety (SDS) with the over­all goal to con­tribute on bet­ter under­stand­ing of the impor­tance of sign­ing and wayfind­ing and to encour­age greater focus in the design dis­ci­plines, indus­try and edu­ca­tion. The speak­ers of the Fri­day sem­i­nar City Iden­tity & Wayfind­ing each hold a posi­tion or have done remark­able work in this field of exper­tise and shared their knowledge.

Orga­ni­za­tion

The open­ing words were by Mike Wolff (SDS) and Mar­tin Foessleit­ner (IIID­Space), my com­pli­ments to the crew for orga­niz­ing this great event. We got a per­son­al­ized book­let with all speak­ers of today and addi­tional space on each page to write down remarks, lunch, drinks, cof­fee and superb talks, great!

1. Jim Northover

Global Cities, Local Places:
the chal­lenge of iden­tity in urban environments

First speaker on stage (09:00 sharp) was Jim Northover, Jim talked about the iden­tity of cities and its unique­ness to cre­ate an remem­ber­able expe­ri­ence. Inter­est­ing topic Jim men­tioned was the look at his­tor­i­cal facts such as the Roman build city Rome and its struc­ture on traf­fic flow and circulation.

• Find out more about Jim Northover at his cor­po­rate web­site Lloyd­Northover.

2. Hal­ime Fisenk and Zeynep Aran

Envi­ron­men­tal sign sys­tem as a visual lan­guage mat­ter in Turkey

Two Turk­ish design­ers are build­ing a case on cre­at­ing a sign sys­tem for cities in Turkey. The main prob­lem is that there is no clear and con­cise sys­tem of signs show­ing street names, direc­tions and more. From the Turk­ish cul­ture peo­ple nav­i­gate by ask­ing locals the way. The stu­dents have come up with a color coded sys­tem and a sign pro­posal to cre­ate make Turkey more leg­i­ble. Keep up the work and good luck.

3. Khanna Raman

Read­ing the city of Delhi:
wayfind­ing strate­gies for inter­na­tional tourism

From Turkey to India where Khanna Raman talks about the need for infor­ma­tion sys­tems for inter­na­tional tourism. In 2010 India will host the Com­mon­wealth Games and this will be an oppor­tu­nity to cre­ate new wayfind­ing sys­tems that over­sees the illit­er­acy, cul­tural biases and over­crowded pub­lic spaces. From his point of view new mobile tech­nolo­gies will be used to nav­i­gate eas­ier from one to another location.

4. Tim Fendley

A prin­ci­pled approach to design­ing urban wayfinding

Tim Fend­ley talks about the project Leg­i­ble Lon­don and the the­ory behind the wayfind­ing strat­egy, he talked about the aware­ness of infor­ma­tion sys­tems that can be used as a seam­less guid­ance in your city jour­ney. As Tim con­tin­ued his talk he men­tions the issues of nam­ing the parts of a city, as from his­tor­i­cal point of view areas or neigh­bor­hoods can have dif­fer­ent names. By research­ing the areas and ques­tion­ing locals they have gath­ered all the cor­rect infor­ma­tion as needed to locate an area. Fur­ther on Tims shows us a soft­ware tool which they use to get infor­ma­tion on or off a nav­i­ga­tion map, an impres­sive way to cre­ate dif­fer­ent maps for each spe­cific need in urban wayfind­ing. With var­i­ous exam­ples of good and bad we got a great insight on urban wayfinding.

• Find out more about Tim Fend­ley at his cor­po­rate com­pany Applied Infor­ma­tion Group and fol­low Tim Fend­ley on Twit­ter.

5. Barry Gray

Barry talked about the lat­est devel­op­ments in the stan­dard­i­s­a­tion of graph­i­cal sym­bols and signs. With many exam­ples Barry empha­sized the impor­tance of the ISO stan­dard on test­ing and using sym­bols and icons in wayfind­ing sys­tems. This resulted in a dis­cus­sion about the cul­tural dif­fer­ences and inter­pre­ta­tion of graph­i­cal sym­bols. They plan to release a search able data­base that will give out the sym­bol that you can use in the design. Look­ing for­ward to this new functionality.

• Find out more about the ISO Stan­dard of graph­i­cal sym­bols at the Inter­na­tional Orga­ni­za­tion for Stan­dard­iza­tion.

6. Ste­fan Egger

Tern: A new traf­fic type­face for the Trans Euro­pean Road Network

Ste­fan Egger talked about a Euro­pean Union project named “In-Saftey”, where a type­face should be devel­oped to meet the demands of road users since the intro­duc­tion of the inter­na­tional stan­dards (41 years ago agreed on). In a team of type devel­op­ers Erik Spiek­er­mann is involved to cre­ate the type­face TERN. Ste­fan talked about how the type­face is devel­oped and what cri­te­ria was used to make it leg­i­ble on road signs or elec­tri­cal signs. In 2010 Aus­tria will be the fist to have the type­face TERN Nar­row on its roadsigns.

7. Gökhan Namanoglu

For the Istan­bul Sum­mer Olympics 2020 Gökhan Namanoglu is research­ing if inter­na­tional pic­to­graphic lan­guages exists and this project will focus on the func­tion and effec­tive­ness on pictograms.

8. Nic Banks

Sign­ing pub­lic trans­port systems

After lunch Nic Banks got on stage to talk about his work in Asia for design­ing sig­nage sys­tems for trans­port facil­i­ties in Bangkok, Dubai, Hong Kong and more. Nic pointed out that the prin­ci­ple of sig­nage is to move and nav­i­gate and will holds its own iden­tity. To clearly inform pas­sen­gers of under­stand­ing a facil­ity forms the back-bone of all good trans­port sys­tems. Nic addresses the dif­fer­ences between cul­tures and its inter­pre­ta­tion of infor­ma­tion on which a sig­nage sys­tem is build. With var­i­ous exam­ples we got a great insight on trans­port sig­nage sys­tems in Asia.

• Find out more about Nic Banks and his cor­po­rate com­pany Ate­lier Pacific Lim­ited Hong Kong.

9. Matt Butters

Heathrow Air­port Ter­mi­nal 5

Designed to han­dle over thirty mil­lion pas­sen­gers a year this air­port ter­mi­nal was to bring together the stan­dards of mod­ern ter­mi­nal design. Matt But­ters talks about the way archi­tec­ture can play a part in wayfind­ing to cre­ate a clar­ity in ori­en­ta­tion and infor­ma­tion deliv­ery. This intu­itive way of design­ing a build­ing will cre­ate trust with its pas­sen­gers who will find their gates with ease. Sig­nage has become a part of its facility.

• Find out more about Matt But­ters and his cor­po­rate com­pany Pas­call + Wat­son.

10. Hel­mut Ness

Messe Frank­furt

Messe Frank­furt is world’s largest faire trade com­pany with over 578,000 square meters of ground cover. Within three sep­a­rate build­ings an cur­rent wayfind­ing sys­tem is not pro­vid­ing the needed infor­ma­tion. Hel­mut Ness talks about the new and improved wayfind­ing sys­tem they have devel­oped with a cus­tom Univers type­face designed by Erik Spiek­er­mann. Their ideas con­sists of the right bal­ance in show­ing dynamic and fixed infor­ma­tion within a cir­cu­lar red fol­low­ing line that con­nects all three buildings.

• Find out more about Hel­mut Ness and his cor­po­rate com­pany Fuen­fw­erken Design AG.

11. Tony Howard

Pub­lic ser­vice or brand opportunism

As every­body has prob­lems with clients demands Tony Howard talked about the sign­ing and wayfind­ing for Dubai Metro. Tony dis­cusses how they designed spe­cific cul­tural pic­tograms and cus­tom type­face that com­bines Latin and Ara­bic char­ac­ters in one type­face. Inter­est­ing enough the way pub­lic sig­nage is han­dled in Dubai is to sell ‘adver­tis­ing’ space on signs in order to cre­ate income. Tony talks about how the man­aged to under these cir­cum­stances cre­ated a work­ing sig­nage system.

• Find out more about Tony Howard and his cor­po­rate com­pany Trans­port Design Con­sul­tancy.

12. Tom­mie Nyström

Teach­ing wayfind­ing at Stuttgart Media University

The future of infor­ma­tion design is in the hands of stu­dents. Tom­mie Nys­tröm has stu­dents who per­form wayfind­ing stud­ies for well known places such as the Porsche Museum and let them come up with new ideas to show infor­ma­tion. Within 6 weeks the stu­dents go from idea to pro­to­type and present their ideas as parts of their study.

• Find out more about Tom­mie Nys­tröm and the Stuttgart Media Uni­ver­sity.

13. Ralf Herrmann

Wayfind­ing typefaces

Ralf Her­rmann stud­ied for over three years road sig­nage type­faces through­out Europe. His study shows many type­faces have dif­fi­cul­ties under cer­tain cir­cum­stances, Ralf Her­rmann decided to design his own wayfind­ing type­face based on his ideas of max­i­mum leg­i­bil­ity. He cre­ated a soft­ware tool to sim­u­late read­ing con­di­tions in order cre­ate a work­ing wayfind­ing type­face under all weather and dis­tance con­di­tions. Cur­rently in beta.

• Find out more about Ralf Her­rmann and his type­face Wayfind­ing at his web­site Open Type, see here for an review of his type­face.

14. Clive Richards

A pic­ture isn’t always worth 1000 words

Clive Richards the pres­i­dent of IIID / UK had a pre­sen­ta­tion about the design of warn­ing labels in par­tic­u­lar for trac­tor secu­rity. The man­u­fac­turer of trac­tors wished to min­i­mize the num­ber of dif­fer­ent lan­guage vari­ants needed on the labels, Clive talks about the prob­lems that they faced and how they man­aged to max­i­mize the level of under­stand­ing of graph­i­cal information.

15. Cliff Selbert

Find­ing your way while enhanc­ing your brand

Cliff Sel­bert has a spe­cific approach in wayfind­ing and land­mark­ing, their phi­los­o­phy con­sists on cre­at­ing big envi­ron­men­tal sculp­tures to cre­ate an iden­tity for its area. This is an inter­est­ing way of mak­ing areas or facil­i­ties leg­i­ble and while cre­at­ing an photo oppor­tu­nity peo­ple will remem­ber the loca­tion more intense. Cliff talked about the park­ing for Dis­ney where they used music and images to let vis­i­tors remem­ber the loca­tion and enhance the expe­ri­ence which will be linked to the brand.

• Find out more about Cliff Sel­bert and his cor­po­rate com­pany Sel­bert Perkins Design.

16. David Gibson

Find­ing the hid­den logic

After about 9 hours of talk David Gib­son had the task to close this marathon day of speak­ers. With his book The Wayfind­ing Hand­book David is cre­at­ing leg­i­ble envi­ro­ments by find­ing the hid­den logic. With basic prin­ci­ples he cre­ates sys­tems that allows us to find our way in unfa­mil­iar envi­ron­ments. With his recent visit to Bei­jing David tells about the hid­den logic he found in this immense city.

• Find out more about David Gib­son and his cor­po­rate com­pany TwoTwelve or read the review on The Wayfind­ing Hand­book.

Addi­tional information:

Hope­fully IIID and SDS will con­tinue host­ing these events in the future, if you want to know more about the orga­ni­za­tions or the event please use the fol­low­ing links.

• Sign09 Vienna Event
• Inter­na­tional Insti­tute for Infor­ma­tion Design — IIIDSpace
• Sign Design Soci­ety — SDS

After­wards we had a great din­ner and drink till late. Thanks every­body for the open-minds and great talks about our com­mon inter­ests. Thank you Peter for show­ing us around in Vienna. See you next year!