Discover the fundamental principles of wayfinding and explore how people navigate complex spaces. This course provides a comprehensive overview of wayfinding strategies, human behavior, and the tools used to create intuitive navigation systems. Ideal for beginners, this course sets the foundation for understanding spatial navigation and effective wayfinding design.
Wayfinding takes place everywhere and every day including in locations such as airports, shopping malls, city center’s, urban areas, parks, bay trails, hospitals, and train stations.
But why do so many people get lost so easily and what can we do to improve not only how people find their way and navigate from one place to another, but how can we improve the experience and help people enjoy re-visiting the public places.
I’m Paul Symonds and I’ve got a PhD in wayfinding, I’ve produced academic articles on wayfinding and provided wayfinding audits and assessment for different locations, including for some international airports.
The benefits of doing this course are that it will give you a solid and strong overall understanding of Wayfinding and what it is, how we can improve the way we direct people to make places more inclusive, safer, easier, and more enjoyable to navigate around.
In this course I cover
- What wayfinding is and where it takes place
- I give real world examples such as from airports, bay trails, cities, hospitals, university campuses, train stations and various locations, to give you examples.
- There’s a section on the elements of wayfinding such as edges, nodes, and districts.
- And a section on psychology and sociology and how they impact wayfinding and how we find our way around and to places.
- There’s a large section on human behaviour and how this affects how we design wayfinding cues and systems and there’s a section on technology.
- I’ve also included some activities and quizzes to make the learning more fun.
This is a beginners course so it is suitable for everyone so whether you are a student studying design, business, tourism, art and design, architecture or something else, this course is suitable for you.
Likewise, if you are an architect, graphic designer, urban planner, manager of a tourism location or transport hub, estates manager, so anyone who might benefit from understanding more about wayfinding as an overall topic.
Please sign up for this course as I think you will find it really interesting and fun to do.
