Proceedings of: Workshop on Improving Building Design for Persons with Low Vision

Use color and design to create architectural landmarks to aid in spatial orientation (slides 8 – 10)

We can use color and texture to facilitate wayfinding. We talked yesterday that thinking about it in terms of gray scale. For example, in the space on the left [in slide 8], there’s a color definition behind the main reception desk. Now, yes, there’s a lot of glare in this space. It was an east-facing wall looking over the Mississippi River. But there is some sense of [orientation] of where you go when you need to find information and also spatial orientation.

Then also, looking at vertical wayfinding, where you’ve got a set of stairs [right photo in slide 8], the same color continues up, denotes that spot on the plan where you are. Using those things on a larger scale can help people navigate vertically through a building and then also horizontally [in those areas].

Again [slide 9, left photo], color denotes areas of plan. We’ve got a glass wall in front of the YMCA building that continues the entire length of the building, and they’re denoting where that entrance is with a large red stripe. This is where you’re supposed to go to get in.

And then the same thing on the floor-plan signage [slide 9, right photo]. We’ve got different areas of the floor plan highlighted in colors on the map. To the right of that and cut off the [slide] is the list of departments and a dot with the corresponding color to the location on the map. And then throughout that building, the signage corresponded to the location on the map. So if you were in the orange section, all of the signage in that section had a little orange square on it to help you continue your spatial orientation.

And I changed [slide 10] so that this is actually another point that it’s going to make it easier to navigate a building if the main circulation paths on different floors are similar. This plan shows Level One on the left and Level Two on the right. And I purposely gray-scaled Level Two after our conversation yesterday about “can we make it [signage] universal for color deficiencies.”

For the most part, it works. You can’t tell the difference between the gray on the righthand floor plan and the green on the left. The purple and the red are pretty similar, but they’re far enough away that it’s not as confusing. I was more concerned that the blue and the purple might end up being the same gray-scale value.