segdDESIGN 30

You imagine. We build.

“Make a 60-foot-long stadium entrance that wows the fans and that has to anchor into landfill.”

120 linear feet of continuous ¼” fillet welding, done on-site.

“Join a 16-foot high by 4½” frame to an 8” runner but secure it only at the bottom.”

Concrete sign anchor pad, 70 feet long by 8 feet wide by 2 feet thick, with secure footing specially engineered for loose soil conditions.

“Build it to withstand 120-mileper-hour wind loads and keep it under 5 inches thick.”

Cold-rolled steel, built in four 15-foot sections, 4½” thick, with bituminouscoated aluminum paneling, drilled, tapped, and fastened with countersunk stainless steel screws.

Citi Field, New York City Designer: Two Twelve Associates Architect: HOK Sport Owner/Developer: New York Mets Contractor: Hunt/Bovis Project Scope: Two ballpark silhouette entranceway signs; a complete parking lot wayfinding signage system, including 40 lollipop vehicular signs and 20 pedestrian signs; and 26 graphic player banners.

segdDESIGN

Signs Environments Graphics Designs

Wayfinding in Your Pocket + Dynamic Environments + Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal + CityCenter + Hablamos Juntos

30 2010 no.

NUMBER 30, 2010

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“The graphics have to last a very long time.”

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no. 30

Contents

30

40

24

48

36

Features

56

23

64 Flying High

Dynamic Environments From media-rich corporate offices to iPhone apps and interactive wayfinding, environmental graphics are real-time and media rich.

24 Taking Stock

In the sleek new Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal offices, digital

displays celebrate journalism’s brave new world.

30

A Piece of the Rock Hard Rock Cafe uses a suite of interactive displays to hook fans on its rich rock ’n’ roll memorabilia collection.

36

Media Macau A four-tower media façade changes the skyline of China’s Las Vegas.

40

All Hands on Tech On Royal Caribbean’s newest and biggest cruise ship, passengers find the fun using an interactive wayfinding system.

48 Wayfinding in Your Pocket Smartphone apps are adding a new dimension to traditional wayfinding.

70

56

70

Neo Las Vegas Environmental graphics quietly unify CityCenter, the $8.5 billion urban resort destination on the Las Vegas Strip.

An entrepreneurial education center uses architecture, landscape, interiors, and environmental graphics to tell its story.

We Speak Together A multidisciplinary collaborative research effort advances the use of symbols in health-care settings.

Columns 8 11 15

77 78 79 80

From the Editor by Jessica London Viewpoint (Still) Learning from Las Vegas Shortlist Infantry Museum, Amsterdam Childrens’ Hospital, Keen Shoes Ad Index Out There Design Marketplace Get Lost

On the cover: The American Museum of Natural History’s Explorer iPhone app helps visitors find treasure in a complex museum environment. (Image: AMNH)

segdDESIGN 3

Publisher SEGD Services Corp.

Editor in Chief Jessica London jessica@segd.org

Founding Editor in Chief Leslie Gallery Dilworth, FAIA

Executive Editor Ann Makowski ann@segd.org

Editor Pat Matson Knapp pat@segd.org

Design James Pittman, Design Director LuAnn Arena, Design Associate

Executive and Editorial Offices 1000 Vermont Ave., NW Suite 400 Washington, DC 20005 Phone: 202.638.5555 Fax: 202.478.2286 www.segd.org segd@segd.org

Advertising Sales Sara Naegelin 512.524.2596 sara@segd.org

Editorial, Subscriptions, Reprints, Back Issues 202.638.5555 segd@segd.org

segdDESIGN is the international journal of environmental graphic design and the Society for Environmental Graphic Design. Opinions expressed editorially and by contributors are not necessarily those of SEGD. Advertisements appearing in segdDESIGN do not constitute or imply endorsement by SEGD or segdDESIGN. Material in this magazine is copyrighted. Photocopying for academic purposes is permissible, with appropriate credit. segdDESIGN is published four times a year by the Society for Environmental Graphic Design. Periodical postage paid at York, PA, and additional mailing offices.

Subscriptions: US $200/year, Canada and Int’l $275/year. Send US funds to segdDESIGN, 1000 Vermont Ave., NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20005.

To charge your order, call 202.638.5555.

Postmaster: Send address changes to segdDESIGN, 1000 Vermont Ave., NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20005. Š segdDESIGN 2010 SSN: 1551-4595

4 segdDESIGN

vive la diversité montreal.segd.org

Save the date!

June 1 through 4 2011 segd annual conference + EXPO Hyatt Regency Montréal Montréal, CANADA

Inscrivez à votre agenda

1 au 4 juin 2011 SEGD conférence annuelle + EXPO Hyatt Regency Montréal Montréal, CANADA

Photos clockwise from upper left: Copyright Ryan Dickey; Martine Doyen; Just for Laughs Festival; Palais des congrès de Montréal, Marc Cramer; Théâtre du Nouveau Monde; Casino de Montréal

1000 Vermont Ave, NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20005 www.segd.org

U.S. Citizens! Passports are required for entry to Canada.

If you don’t already have one it’s a good time to start the process. segdDESIGN 5

2010 segdDESIGN Sponsors and Patrons Our sincere thanks to segdDESIGN’s 2010 Sponsors and Patrons!

H $2,500+ Sponsors

H $500 Patrons • FMG Design • Jonathan Alger, • Pentagram C&G Partners • Ralph Appelbaum Associates • Calori & Vanden Eynden H $1,000 Sponsors • The Douglas | Group • APCO • Alan Jacobson, ex;it • Cloud Gehshan • Infinite Scale Design • CommArts Group • Gallagher & Associates • Kelly Kolar • Graham Hanson Design • Robert Goes • Hunt Design • Kate Keating Associates • Nordquist Would you like to be a • Shikatani Lacroix Brandesign Sponsor or Patron?

• Two Twelve Email sara@segd.org

SEGD BOARD OF DIRECTORS Officers President: Wayne McCutcheon, Entro Communications, Toronto Vice President: Amy Lukas, Infinite Scale Design Group, Salt Lake City Treasurer: Gary Stemler, Nordquist, Minneapolis Jill Ayers, Design360, New York Jennifer Bressler, Hunt Design, Pasadena Teresa Cox, APCO Graphics, Atlanta Peter Dixon, Prophet, New York Paul Gable, Gable Signs, Baltimore Michael Gericke, Pentagram, New York Sue Gould, Lebowitz | Gould | Design, New York Mary Grems, FMG Design, Houston Edwin L. Hofmann, Limited Brands, New York Lonny Israel, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, San Francisco Cybelle Jones, Gallagher & Associates, Silver Spring, Md. James Keppel, thirty three thousand feet, Boulder Kelly Kolar, Kolar Design, Cincinnati Tali Krakowsky, Apologue, Los Angeles Phil Lenger, Show+Tell, New York John Lutz, Selbert Perkins Design, Chicago Daniel Montaño, Lippincott, New York Tucker Trotter, Dimensional Innovations, Overland Park, KS Mark VanderKlipp, Corbin Design, Traverse City, Mich.

Alexandra Wood, The Holmes Wood Consultancy, London Ex Officio Steven Stamper, fd2s, Austin (Past President) David Middleton, Kent State University, Kent, OH

Society for Environmental Graphic Design The global community of people working at the intersection of communication design and the built environment

6 segdDESIGN

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no. 30

From the Editor

Moving Forward It

gives me great pleasure to join SEGD at this point in the organization’s evolution. I know that I follow in the footsteps of dedicated predecessors, and feel privileged to have the opportunity to lead the way forward.

I come to SEGD with experience working with several world-class cultural institutions. In addition to increasing operating revenue and institutional profile, I have worked on numerous projects in graphic and museum exhibition design, brand identity campaigns, new building architecture, wayfinding, and education, and have collaborated with exceptional designers, architects, industry professionals, and members.

Now, I’m looking forward to expanding SEGD’s remarkable programs and resources in education, professional development, publications, and awarding excellence. I hope, by extension, to enhance recognition of the organization and environmental graphic design both within and outside its field. My goals include securing new partners and sponsors, building membership nationally and internationally, and initiating new ventures that will take SEGD to places it hasn’t been before.

Environmental graphic design has a vital role to play in creating the world we inhabit and will inhabit in the future. SEGD has always excelled at promoting the value of this influential discipline, and will continue to do so. From our International Symposium October 22 in London to the fourth annual SEGD Dynamic Environments Workshop in Las Vegas November 11-12, to the 2011 SEGD Conference + Expo scheduled for June 1-4 in Montreal, SEGD is accelerating its activities in prime markets.

There is exciting momentum and great promise ahead.

Over the past few months, I have had occasion to speak at length both with dedicated “veterans” of SEGD and with some more recently engaged.

It is my hope to get to know many more members and prospective members in the coming months, and to work with all of you to realize the potential of this remarkable organization.

Jessica London, CEO

8 segdDESIGN

Dynamic Duo In this issue of segdDESIGN, we explore some of the ways that technology is changing the face of environmental graphic design. Beginning on page 24, enjoy features on media-rich corporate offices, dynamic wayfinding for hospitality and health-care settings, interactive and social media installations, and smartphone apps.

And while technology is a beautiful and exciting thing, pictograms are as old as time and still one of the most effective forms of human communication. SEGD and Hablamos Juntos recently concluded a multi-phase, multidisciplinary research collaboration that culminated in the Universal Symbols in Health Care, a set of 54 graphic symbols that will make hospitals easier to navigate for underserved populations and patients with limited English or reading proficiency. See our story, page 70.

House lights dim. The audience quiets in anticipation.

Backstage, the adrenaline surges.

Every mark must be hit. Set pieces fly, floors raise, music swells on cue.

All my notes are put into action.

“Standby: Light cue 2A. Go.”

ÜBER PROJECT MANAGEMENT.

© 2010 Nordquist Sign Company, Inc.

no. 30

Viewpoint

(Still) Learning from Las Vegas Can heroic architecture co-exist with strong environmental graphic design? by craig berger

Morphosis’ CalTrans District 7 headquarters is a rare example of architecture and environmental graphic design in perfect balance.

(Photo: Roland Halbe)

I

remember when SEGD held its 2003 annual conference in Las Vegas. (Our conference headquarters, the Mandalay Bay Hotel, was cutting-edge in those days.) During the conference, an SEGD member mentioned that he didn’t “get” a book I had recommended reading—Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steve Izenour.

Perhaps it wasn’t the easiest read (he felt it used too much “architect lingo”), but I have always believed, and still do, that this is one of the seminal books in the environmental graphic design world.

It was the first book to analyze signs as architectural iconography and buildings as structures that could support modern commerce through brand and identity—rather than just serving as totems of modernity.

When Venturi, Scott Brown, and their Yale University students analyzed the Strip signs and casinos of 1970 Las Vegas (Circus Circus was cutting-edge then), they came to the conclusion that Vegas was on the vanguard of something new, an advancement of the idea that architecture as a “decorated shed” was just as

important a field of study as the “heroic architecture” that defined postwar America. Learning from Las Vegas not only heralded the rise of postmodernism, but also the concept of environmental graphics that linked architecture and identity (a fact not lost on EGD pioneers like Romedi Passini, John Follis, and Paul Arthur).

This history is important when observing the current architectural scene, advances in digital media environments, and trends in Las Vegas today. With SEGD returning to Las Vegas this month for its fourth annual Dynamic Environments workshop, this seemed a great segdDESIGN 11

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As pictured above, the new Ripley’s Believe It or Not!Ž museum was looking for a LED banner that would be as striking as the exhibits on display. Sunrise Systems provided a flexible LED solution to fit the curved architecture of the lobby. The 32 inch display can be seen by passersby on the sidewalk , outside of the quirky venue.

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CityCenter, MGM Resorts International’s new “urban resort destination,” brings heroic architecture to Las Vegas. (Photo: MGM Resorts International)

opportunity to reinvestigate the relationship between the matured field of EGD and Las Vegas’ brand of the “heroic” architecture that has defined international urbanity over the last two decades.

Vanity Fair magazine recently asked 52 of the world’s leading architects and design journalists to rate the most important works of architecture built in the last 30 years, as well as the top building of the 21st century. The results were all over the place, to say the least—with only one building receiving a consensus vote (the Guggenheim Bilbao by Frank Gehry). But nearly every structure on the list represented updated modernism in its many forms, including Brutalism, Transparency, Deconstructivism, Technological, and High Modernism.

Another common thread among the chosen architecture? With the stunning exception of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, there was a noticable lack of overt environmental graphics. But this trend back toward heroic modern architecture (which we lately call “starchitecture”) has been matched by a parallel growth in environmental graphic design. In the last 30 years, environmental graphics have made their mark on a wide range of projects, defining places and spaces around the world.

I don’t mean to imply there have been no high-level, balanced integrations of heroic architecture and environmental graphics.

The Arizona Cardinals Stadium—with architecture by Eisenman Architects and environmental graphics by Pentagram and Entro Communications—is a well-documented example, as well as Morphosis’ Caltrans District 7 headquarters in Los Angeles. These are rare exceptions. More often than not, environmental graphics are either politely submissive to the architecture or, at the other end of the spectrum, overwhelm the decorated shed with superscaled graphics or digital media.

When we return to Las Vegas today, we see these conflicting trends in action. Modern Las Vegas has been defined by Venturi and Scott

Learning from Las Vegas was the first book to analyze signs as architecture iconography.

(Image: MIT Press)

Brown’s decorated shed for the last 50 years. The mega-neon signs of the 1950s and 1960s were replaced by the mega-porte cocheres of the 1970s and 80s. The heroic blip of the unloved Luxor Hotel was soon augmented with ever-more fanciful themed experiences, including a mini Paris and New York. In the 21st century, the sex and swagger of the club scene resulted in the Fremont Street Experience, The Palm, and Fashion Show Mall.

But the lure of the heroic even leads here. For all its mixed reviews, CityCenter is the new bright spot on the Las Vegas Strip. In this new architecture-themed neighborhood (with buildings designed by the likes of Libeskind, Pelli, Jahn, and Foster), architecture is clearly the star. And this may be a trend: Gehry and Morphosis are slated to build in Las Vegas, as well. But CityCenter (and hopefully the planned buildings) also include beautiful, well integrated, and appropriate public art, water features, landmarks, and wayfinding and environmental graphics.

So Las Vegas may indeed be a microcosm of the tension between architecture and EGD. But this will need to be judged over the next 30 years. Only time will tell if these new architectural landmarks will make Las Vegas a 21st century urban center for heroic modernism. Or will the future of the city be on display at the Las Vegas Boneyard, alongside the famous landmark signs of the past, the Palm’s roof mast, or New York New York’s Statue of Liberty? Will the Aria get the dynamite like the old Sands Hotel, phased out for the newest design craze?

Or perhaps the two worlds can coexist, as they do at the Bellagio— where the building and the fountain spectacle have both become part of the permanent fabric of the city. These answers will be important to the way we look at environmental graphics and architecture well into the future.

Craig Berger, a trained architect, is SEGD’s director of education and professional development. He can be reached at craig@segd.org.

segdDESIGN 13

no. 30

The Last 100 Yards A new exhibit at the National Infantry Museum in Columbus, Ga., was designed to portray the valor of “the guys on the ground” and the timeless drama of seizing the enemy’s land during battle.

For “The Infantry Owns the Last 100 Yards,” Christopher Chadbourne & Associates (Boston) created a 100-yard-long, 30-ft.-wide ramp that represents soldiers’ final advance.

Stretching like a bayonet through the museum’s central gallery space—and flanked by 14 7-ft.-tall, etched-glass pylons representing Army values—the path ascends through two floors of the museum and takes visitors on an immersive journey through 230 years of infantry history, from the American Revolution to the Gulf Wars.

Multimedia elements add to the drama. An original musical score works in tandem with front and rear projections onto a variety of novel surfaces, including theatrical scrims, shelltorn buildings, the cliffs at Omaha Beach, and the open canopy of a descending Airborne trooper. (Fabrication: Design Craftsmen. A/V Media: Donna Lawrence Productions.

Interactive Media: Pyramid Studios. Sound: Akustics. A/V Systems Integration: Edwards Technologies. Lighting: Available Light. Photos: Jay Rosenblatt)

Short List

segdDESIGN 15

no. 30

Short List

Kinder-Loving Care Amsterdam’s Emma Children’s Hospital is undergoing a major renovation, and the first phase—the Neonatal Care Unit and Staff— opened early this year. Working with architects OD205, OPERA Amsterdam designed the interiors to accommodate not only the needs of the tiny patients, but the around-the-clock presence of people caring for them, including their entire families.

OPERA’s design includes a cheerful-but-sophisticated color scheme, commissioned illustrations to reinforce department themes, and a symbols-based wayfinding system that employs floor graphics,

suspended ceiling art, and traditional signage to help families and visitors through the space.

OPERA treated the hospital’s main corridor like the high street running through a town, providing wayfinding elements that link the hospital departments. Zone markers and simple directories lead visitors to patient rooms and public areas. Floor graphics and ceiling-suspended symbols help reinforce the system and provide bright spots of color in the crisp white hallways.

(Photos: Mike Bink) segdDESIGN 17

no. 30

Short List

Keen and Green Social and environmental responsibility are pillars of footwear-maker KEEN’s mission statement. So when the company needed a new tradeshow exhibit, responsible use of resources was a must.

Sustainable exhibit fabricator Greenspace (Portland, Ore.) and design firm Dept of Energy (Seattle) partnered with KEEN to create an exhibit made from 80% reclaimed, recycled, or repurposed materials— most locally sourced.

Dept of Energy’s concept was for a booth structure made of used shipping pallets. Greenspace engineered the idea into reality by creating an aluminumextrusion frame system that the pallets fit into, allowing for easy assembly and disassembly. The booth’s stage and framing were formerly bleachers in a Eugene, Ore., high school. Tabletops are cast-off auto hoods, seating is covered in repurposed auto upholstery, and shelving is made from old license plates and street

signs. Repurposed rebar, soy barrels, bike parts, and lumber are also on the materials list.

Even “new” materials were chosen carefully: hard walls are made of recyclable laminated fiberboard, and vinyl used for graphics is biodegradable in two years. And for the cynics who say green is more expensive: the team replaced KEEN’s old 3,500-sq.-ft. exhibit with a 5,400-sq.-ft. space for the same annual budget. (Photos: Joshua White)

segdDESIGN 19

2011 SEGD Design Awards Program Deadline January 31

www.segd.org

20 segdDESIGN

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Daktronics worked closely with JPRA Architects to design displays with custom curvatures to match the interior structure of Block 37’s Center Court, five story atrium façade.

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SEGD Dynamic

Environments

4

The Skinnable Space: Places that Change, Live, and Grow November 11 – 12, 2010

Today’s dynamic spaces are living, breathing organisms that can react and transform in response to a variety of environmental and sociological conditions. Using new display technologies and a palette of light, sound, imagery, and information, environmental designers can create permanent spaces with the same range of flexibility that theater designers have enjoyed for ages.

n

Las Vegas

Lead Sponsor Daktronics Sponsors Barco, D3 LED, Prysm, YESCO Patrons The Barnycz Group, Edwards Technologies, GKD-USA, Show + Tell, SignComp, Space150

At multiple Las Vegas venues—from the Cirque du Soleil’s Viva ELVIS show at CityCenter to the Las Vegas Boneyard—we’ll learn how today’s dynamic places are created through multidisciplinary collaborations.

CityCenter, Las Vegas (Photo: Jeff Green Photography)

www.segd.org

segdDESIGN 23

24 segdDESIGN

Taking Stock

Environmental graphics for the sleek new Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal headquarters celebrate journalism’s brave new world, but nod respectfully to its past. By Deborah K. Dietsch

T

he new offices of Dow Jones, best known for publishing The Wall Street Journal, are a far cry from the typically cluttered, chaotic newsrooms where journalists hustle to meet their deadlines.

The interiors are sleek, orderly, and well designed, from blue-tempered glass walls and polished terrazzo floors to crisp nameplates on each desk. More unusual still, largescale digital displays animate the space and reflect the ongoing changes in the news business as it expands from print to online delivery.

Studios Architecture and Design360 (both of New York) began work on the offices soon after Rupert Murdoch’s media empire News Corporation acquired Dow Jones in 2007. The architects consolidated the news and financial information company on five floors of the Midtown Manhattan high-rise where The New York Post, Fox News, and other News Corp. operations are headquartered.

Before the move, Dow Jones employees worked in far less commodious offices in Lower Manhattan and New Jersey. “We used to be in two buildings separated by the Hudson River,” recalls Howard Hoffman, Dow Jones’ vice president of corporate affairs. “We moved because we needed to unify our news operations and work together more collaboratively and efficiently.”

Opposite: Large-scale digital displays animate the staggered stairways of the Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal offices and reflect the fast pace of the news industry.

Above: As an alternative to costly LCD or plasma technology, Design360 and XL Video Lab collaborated to create a dynamic display using open-work aluminum panels supporting an arrangement of lightweight, semitransparent LED units called PixLED F-20s.

segdDESIGN 25

Branding the news, past and present

In response to this mandate, Studios designed unencumbered offices with few partitions and floors connected by staggered staircases that provide views to several levels simultaneously. “The spaces have so many open sightlines that we didn’t need to create much wayfinding,” says Jill Ayers, Design360’s creative director.

Instead, the designers concentrated on enlivening the 270,000 sq. ft. of offices with environmental graphics that celebrate today’s news culture. “Our challenge was getting up to speed on newer technologies to create a consistent brand across several platforms, from static displays to digital media,” says Ayers.

She based typeface selections on the Helvetica Neue of the 1990s Dow Jones logo, while using materials inspired by traditional printing processes for signage and static elements.

“Jill wanted to play to the heritage of Dow Jones with an inked look,” says Chuck Plockmeyer, account executive for sign fabricator Xibitz (Grand Rapids, Mich.). In a nod to traditional newspaper production, he suggested the nameplates and signs for the newsroom incorporate zinc, which suggests the characteristics of magnesium printing plates. For directional signage and display cases, blued steel recreates the look of ink-saturated metal type. Framing and accenting the signage is Richlite, a sustainable paper product symbolic of recycled newspapers.

At the heart of the space, the fast pace of the news business is represented in media walls imparting a sense of dynamism. Rising through the space’s two stair halls, the 35- by 14-ft. and 20- by 14-ft. displays are scrolling bulletins on the stock market, weather, and latest news. When market data and temperatures rise, the type travels upward; when they decrease, it moves down. “The concept was to connect the holes through the spaces with sign boards that project immediate information,” says Tom Krizmanic, a Studios principal.

“They animate the space with a real-time feel.”

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Above: Design360 used the Helvetica Neue of the Dow Jones logo as the foundation font for signage throughout the 270,000sq.-ft. offices. Against a blued steel backplate, the logo for the main identity sign is rendered in pushthrough acrylic with sandblasted steel faces. (Photo: Jeffrey Kilmer)

Opposite top: In the Barron’s corridor, the weekly magazine’s covers are arranged in 52 illuminated niches fronted by acrylic doors so employees can update them. Xibitz ensured the covers were evenly lit by using an LED system to flood the cavities of the display case. (Photo: Jeffrey Kilmer)

Below: Quiet hallways were designed as a retreat from the hectic newsrooms. Here, The Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prizes are displayed in a gridded framework of blued steel, with captions sandblasted into the metal. Wrapping the opposite wall, polyester fabric wallpaper is printed with front-page coverage of major news events. (Photo: ©Albert Vecerka/Esto)

Opposite bottom: Outside the newsroom, a series of video cubes gives the Dow Jones newswires team access to top stories minute by minute as they are sent from various news agencies. (Photo: Jeffrey Kilmer)

Digital drama

While such two- and three-story digital billboards are common features of rock concerts and political conventions, they are rarely installed as permanent fixtures in office interiors. “In corporate environments, this type of display has usually been accomplished through plasma and LCD screens or projectors,” says Gary Madura, project manager and technician for XL Video Lab (New York), the media wall supplier.

“Doing such large plasma displays [at Dow Jones] would have taken a lot more structure and work.”

Instead of incorporating video screens, the media walls are assembled from open-work aluminum panels supporting a grid

of lightweight, semi-transparent LED units called PixLED F-20s.

“They were built like Legos, one row at a time,” recalls Ayers, who spent several months testing the design.

In collaborating with Madura, Ayers ensured the displays reflected the same elegant design as the static signage throughout the offices. “We did elaborate story boards and went through a series of animations,” she says. “The information had to be legible and easy to understand from an angle as well as straight on. And the media walls needed to be airy so they wouldn’t block light into the adjacent office areas.”

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Back to the past

Off the kinetic displays in the stairways are more subdued lounges and coffee bars framed with reminders of newsrooms past. “We could have left the history of Dow Jones in the dust by simply focusing on the future, but instead we decided to bring some of its history into these spaces,” says Ayers. On the walls, archival newsroom photomurals are applied to glazing in colors corresponding to finishes and furnishings on each level. “The graphics are screened onto the glass like ink applied to a printing plate,” she explains. “They have the feel of a newspaper page.”

The company’s more recent accomplishments are celebrated in quiet hallways connecting its different publications. One showcases the Pulitzer Prizes and awards given to The Wall Street Journal within a gridded framework of Richlite and blued steel, with captions sandblasted into the metal. This treatment is repeated for Barron’s in another corridor, where the magazine’s covers are arranged in 52 illuminated niches (one for each week of the year) fronted by acrylic doors so employees can update them. Xibitz ensured the covers were evenly lit from all sides by using an LED system to flood the cavities of the display case.

Wrapping the walls opposite the display cases, polyester fabric wallpaper called JetTex is printed with front-page coverage of major events, including the tragedies of Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

Wallpaper sounds easy to apply, but the hallways’ tilted walls and ceilings complicated the installation. As visual counterpoint to the

gridded display walls, the opposite walls are a series of folding drywall planes interrupted by vertical light coves that cross to the folded ceiling planes.

“The angles and facets made it tricky,” says Plockmeyer. “We had to do a lot of layout work with Jill’s team so the final print of the reproduced publications looked correct on the wall.”

Design for change

Back in the Dow Jones newsrooms, modular workstations allow desks to be quickly reconfigured in response to staff changes without demounting cubicle partitions. “The news organizations are constantly restructuring and moving so we tried to create a completely flexible space,” says project architect Erin Ruby of Studios. Accenting the open areas are digital clocks and video projections of headlines from Dow Jones’ newswire services. Ayers made sure these graphics were consistent with designs throughout the offices by setting up templates on the software provided for the displays.

“Our firm had never done such an intense design package of digital and static signage before,” notes Ayers. “This project opened the door for us to be comfortable with doing more dynamic environments. We now think about graphics in a fresher, less static way.”

Washington, DC-based writer Deborah Dietsch covers art, architecture, and design for numerous publications. Her latest book is Live/Work: Working at Home, Living at Work.

Top: Newspaper offices are fast-changing environments, so workstation signs were made for easy updating. In a nod to traditional newspaper production, nameplates and newsroom signs incorporate zinc, which suggests the characteristics of magnesium printing plates.

Bottom: Design360 enlivened employee spaces such as this conference room with digital murals using archival newsroom images. The images are screened onto glass in colors corresponding to finishes on various levels. (Photo: ©Albert Vecerka/Esto)

DOW JONES/WALL STREET JOURNAL HEADQUARTERS Location New York Client News Corporation Dow Jones Design Design360 Design Team Jill Ayers (creative director), Rachel Einsidler (senior designer), Christine Giberson (designer) Fabrication Xibitz (signage, exhibits, glass panels), XL Video Lab (media walls), Scala (software) Architecture Studios Architecture Consultants Benchmark (construction), POD Digital Promotions (programming), AV Services (media consultants) Photos ©Albert Vecerka/Esto, Jeffrey Kilmer (as noted)

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A Piece of the Rock Hard Rock’s interactive displays put guests in touch with the magic of rock ’n’ roll.

By louis m. brill

I

t may have Cafe or Hotel in the name, but Hard Rock is as much a museum as it is restaurant, hotel, or casino. Its vast memorabilia collection chronicles the history and legacy of rock ’n’ roll, from Eric Clapton’s red Fender Lead II guitar to Jim Morrison’s ripped leather pants. Its more than 72,000 pieces of rock ’n’ roll history are divided among 161 locations worldwide, giving guests in each city just glimpses of the complete collection.

With much of the archive already being digitized for its memorabilia website, Hard Rock’s next obvious step was to create ways for guests to engage with the larger collection no matter which location they were visiting.

“The idea was to get the Hard Rock collection out of ‘the box’ and into the properties,” says Michael Lemme, creative director at Duncan/Channon (San Francisco), Hard Rock’s agency of record and architects of its award-winning memorabilia website. “Hard

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Rock wanted to engage guests in the history and culture of rock ’n’ roll in a fresh way. Why not take the same content and let them interact with it at the Cafe?”

Working with a team of hardware and software development partners as well as their own technology, property-development, and memorabilia staff, Hard Rock recently rolled out three interactive elements—a massive touchscreen “Rock Wall” display, custom applications for Microsoft Surface, and a smaller tableside interface—that get guests up close and personal with the memorabilia.

“Now we can show off a greater degree of rock ’n’ roll history, all controlled by the guests who can select what they want to see and hear,” says Gregory Thomas, general manager of the new flagship Hard Rock Cafe on the Las Vegas Strip, the first of several sites for the new interactives.

Climbing the Rock Wall

Created by Obscura Digital (San Francisco) with Technomedia Solutions (Orlando), the Rock Wall is a custom, 4-ft.-tall by 18-ft.wide interactive display that allows up to six Hard Rock guests to explore the memorabilia collection simultaneously.

Obscura Digital created custom software that provides a single contiguous display surface, but breaks it into individual zones as users begin interacting with it. The zones are fluid rather than being fixed. “There is some intelligence built in so that if one person is on the wall, they have full control of the entire surface,” says Steve Mason, Obscura’s director of interactives. “But when the second person shows up, it will split the difference between where the two people initiated contact, then continue that process as more people touch the surface.”

High-end video graphics hardware (of the caliber used for medical visualization or advanced CAD modeling) and high-definition projectors allow the display to deliver 6000 pixels across and run at 60 frames per second, twice the refresh rate of television. “It really gives people the ability to dive in and look at these items closely,” says Mason. “There is no existing software with the juice to make this happen, so we had to build a lot of this from scratch.”

While the wall allows users their own personal viewing and sound zones (thanks to a spatialized audio system), it was also designed to encourage socializing. Obscura built in features that allow users to “throw” interesting objects to one another across the screen. In addition, if two people are standing next to each other exploring different parts of the database (say one person is interested in Prince and the other likes Elton John), the system will begin scanning for information related to both. When it finds something, the image will pop up between the two users. “It’s subtle and people may not even realize what happened,” says Mason. “But it gives them something to talk about.”

Opposite top: Hard Rock Cafe, established in London in 1971, has 161 locations worldwide, most identified by the iconic superscaled guitar. Eric Clapton’s red Fender Lead II was the first piece of memorabilia in the company’s vast collection. With 72,000 objects, it’s now the world’s largest exhibitor of rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia. (Photo: Hard Rock International)

Opposite below and below: The Rock Wall (designed by Obscura Digital) is a 4-ft.-high by 18-ft.-long multi-touch display that invites guests to immerse themselves in Hard Rock’s memorabilia collection.

The 6000-pixel screen can stream high-resolution photos and video at 60 frames per second, twice the refresh rate of television.

All the interactives connect back to Hard Rock’s award-winning memorabilia website, created by Duncan Channon. (Photos: Hard Rock International)

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Duncan/Channon and Vertigo developed custom memorabilia apps for Microsoft Surface, a multi-touch, multi-user interactive tabletop. Part coffee table, part iPad, it allows users to access memorabilia, see rock ‘n‘ roll film clips, or play games. (Images: Duncan/Channon)

HARD ROCK CAFE INTERACTIVES Client: Hard Rock International Location: Worldwide Design and Development Team: Hard Rock International, Duncan/ Channon, Obscura Digital, Vertigo, Technomedia Solutions, Coleman Technologies

Obscura is now working on version 2.0 of the Rock Wall, which will tie in Hard Rock’s social networking elements, including Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. In addition to the flagship Las Vegas cafe, Rock Walls have been installed in Orlando, Seattle, Los Angele’s and Berlin. It has been so popular with guests that Hard Rock is expanding its deployment with a smaller version, a 52-in. display called the Rock Wall Solo that will soon be going into an additional 16 Hard Rock Cafes throughout the U.S. and Europe.

On the Surface

Using Microsoft Surface, a multi-touch tabletop that allows users to manipulate digital content using gesture recognition, Duncan/ Channon, their software development partner Vertigo (Point Richmond, Calif.) and Hard Rock’s internal team created apps that allow Hard Rock guests to access the memorabilia collection, explore Hard Rock’s worldwide locations, play rock-themed games, and view historic rock ’n’ roll video clips.

“What’s interesting to notice about our guests’ reactions,” says Rick Sconyers, Hard Rock International’s senior director of design, “is how much the younger people are magnetically drawn to these interactive displays. We also see that our ‘older’ guests—perhaps coming from more of a ‘don’t touch’ culture—tend to be more reserved about engaging and experimenting with them.”

But even for shy guests, the rich content is hard to resist. The Microsoft platform is also built for quick development and deployment of new applications and content, ensuring that Hard Rock can quickly roll out fresh features or entirely new applications to any of these interfaces around the world.

New take on a classic

As a fresh take on the classic, table-side jukebox, Duncan/Channon, Vertigo, and Hard Rock also created a touch-enabled interface they call the Booth Interactive.

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Designed to include additional features over time, the interface gives guests access to three custom applications right from their Cafe tables. Music mode allows quests to review and vote on the music playing in the restaurant. Behind the scenes, Hard Rock runs a robust video system coordinating music and video displays across all cafes, hotels, casinos, and live venues worldwide. Guests can find memorabilia related to the music being played or explore the entire collection based on their own interests. And Rock Shop mode is designed for browsing and exploring the stories behind Hard Rock merchandise.

The units have been installed in 38 booths at the flagship Las Vegas location, as well as in Dallas and Nashville.

Booth interactives—essentially high-tech video jukeboxes—allow guests to shop for Hard Rock merchandise, manipulate objects in its memorabilia collection, or vote for the next video showing in Hard Rock cafes. The new flagship Hard Rock Café in Las Vegas has 38 of the interactives. (Images: Duncan/Channon)

Making the wait fun

The new interactives provide Hard Rock with three new ways to engage their guests and promote the Hard Rock experience. All of the interfaces connect back to Hard Rock’s rich and flexible database and change constantly as new items are added to the virtual museum.

The location of the Rock Wall and the other interactives within the Cafe was a strategic decision, notes Sconyers, based largely on keeping guests happy while they’re waiting to be seated. In a typical Hard Rock Cafe on a busy night, he points out, waiting times can average 45 to 90 minutes.

“Now the Rock Wall and Microsoft Surface are placed within the waiting area, and each is loaded with an enormous volume of rock ’n’ roll memorabilia and other fun activities,” he says. “So our guests have additional entertainment to help them pass the time and make their wait more enjoyable.”

Louis M. Brill (louisbrill@sbcglobal.net) is a journalist and consultant for high-tech entertainment and media communications.

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Media Macau In China’s Las Vegas-style gaming mecca, a new hotel/casino complex creates a four-tower digital lightscape. By Louis M. Brill

M

acau’s skyline reflects the kaleidoscopic lights and colors of Las Vegas, but the island off mainland China is carving out its own image, far away from the Strip.

The gaming mecca surpassed Las Vegas in gaming revenues in 2007. Now Macau is positioning itself as a premium destination for luxury hotels, shopping, and live entertainment as well. Here, many hotel/casinos have taken a page from the Las Vegas playbook, using lights and media architecture to proclaim, “we’re the place to be.”

Enter City of Dreams, one of Macau’s latest spectacular destinations.

The four-tower entertainment complex, developed as a joint venture between Melco International Development (Hong Kong) and Crown Entertainment (Melbourne), houses a mega-casino, shopping center, theater, and four hotels.

Designed by Arquitectonica (Miami), City of Dreams distinguishes itself in several ways, most specifically with a unique architectural signature that offers four distinct hotel experiences, says Geoffrey Benham, creative director of Melco Crown Ltd. “Rather than providing a single hotel, we offer a Crown Hotel (the ultimate luxury hotel for discerning guests), a Hard Rock Hotel (fun and hip for the young and young at heart), and the Grand Hyatt Macau (two towers for business and leisure guests alike).”

The complex also includes more than 400,000 sq. ft. of gaming area, a unique dome-shaped attraction known as The Bubble, the Vquarium (a virtual aquarium with “real” mermaids), the Boulevard (a chic lifestyle retail precinct), and a full spectrum of food and beverage venues. In early 2010, producer and director Franco Dragone opened a live show housed in a 2,000 seat, state-of-the-art theater with one of the most impressive commercial pools in the world.

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Media in the mix

One of the challenges of designing the four-tower complex, says Arquitectonica Associate Director Matthew McCallum, was “balancing the individuality of the building designs with the need to create a singular presence for the complex.” The architects used similar materials and forms for all four hotels, including a series of architectural fins designed to catch the ambient lighting around the buildings, cast shadows, and help reinforce the design of each tower.

Media was always in the mix, and the developer commissioned StandardVision, LLC (Los Angeles) to design, engineer, and install a multi-tower media façade that would accentuate the architecture and create a colorful splash on the Macau skyline.

Above: City of Dreams is a four-tower hotel, gaming, and entertainment complex on Macau’s Cotai Strip. An abstract lowresolution light show moves across all four towers, providing a dramatic beacon from across the island.

Opposite: The LED show is displayed across 50,000 meters using 20 kilometers of LED strips.

CITY OF DREAMS Client Melco Crown Ltd. Location Macau Architecture Arquitectonica Media Faรงade Design and Engineering StandardVision, LLC Suppliers/Integrators Kindwin Technology (lights); Electrosonic (content servers, system control); Cisco, Elixir (data infrastructure) Photos StandardVision, LLC

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“We knew the media installation could also provide a unifying effect that would help present the four towers as a single destination,” says Benham.

The collection of towers combine to create a unique video “screen” that goes way beyond the typical x and y configuration. StandardVision combined high-definition video with full color, abstract graphic animations to create an LED light show that flows seamlessly from building to building, covering more than 50,000 meters in all.

“Our client wanted to depart from the well known neon image of flashing Vegas lights,” says Adrian Velicescu, president of StandardVision. “The main desire was to create content movement between the four facades and invite a sense of exploration for the viewers, so it functioned as a conversation piece and the ultimate ‘notto-miss’ Macau destination.”

Instead of looking at the project as four distinct buildings, StandardVision expanded on the architects’ vision of unifying the architecture by creating content that would flow across the four towers. For example, one animation features a 20-story water drop that ripples across the buildings while thousands of water bubbles sparkle in a gentle upward movement.

“Architectural media facades are the ultimate developer’s branding tool,” notes Velicescu. “There are many single-building media facades in the world, but none that actually connects a large city block with multiple buildings.”

Above and right: Working with project architect Arquitectonica, StandardVision also designed a cove media lighting installation for the ceiling of the porte cochere.

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Inventing the wheel

Searching for the appropriate LED module to meet the project’s unique needs, StandardVision discovered that it didn’t exist.

“We realized that a special housing design would have to be produced,” explains Velicescu. “The architectural fin element had different orientations on each façade. In addition, two of the buildings have a circular and elliptical footprint. For the viewer to perceive the installation as one large digital canvas, we needed extreme viewing angles from the lights and reflecting covers that expanded the surface of the lights.”

So StandardVision designed a custom fixture it calls the YPix—a square aluminum module that incorporates a 2-in. reflecting cover surface covered by 14 very bright Nichia lamps. It can be flipped horizontally or vertically depending on where it’s installed. The lights are modular and mounted in the building’s fin caps, making them invisible during the day.

More than 200,000 of the modules—totaling 20 kilometers of LED real estate—are installed on the surfaces of towers, all powered and synchronized from a central location. The lights were manufactured by Kindwin Technology (Hong Kong). Synchronized content servers and system control were provided by Electrosonic (Burbank, Calif.). The entire system relies on the data backbone built by Cisco and Elixir.

Another challenge was processing the video data so highdefinition images are accurately represented on the building. The data-mapping process was far more complex than is typical due to the fact that each building had its own specific fin design.

“To process 200,000 pixels at random locations on the building, we had to use a combination of architectural CAD files, ‘as-built’ contractors’ drawings, high-end 3D software systems, and a lot

of talented engineers crunching numbers late at night,” recalls Velicescu.

Scalability was also a key issue, since what works on a television screen is not the same as what works on a 500-ft.-tall building.

StandardVision implemented a compositing process that provided an accurate pixel-count representation so the results could be judged at scale. “A 30-ft. LED screen installed in our studio was used to view the content at a somewhat overwhelming scale,” Velicescu laughs.

Sightlines were another issue. Melco wanted to be sure the facades were visible from different parts of Macau, as well as from different approaches onto the island, including from the street, from ferries, or from the airport. To test the sightlines, StandardVision mapped the content on 3D models and created virtual views from the main access locations.

The content was filmed with 4K RED cameras in studio using visual effects talent, and on location in Hawaii using a crew of experienced divers from 3Submerged in Maui. Delivered to the four buildings via a high-definition video signal, the content accentuates the architectural forms and creates a dynamic beacon across the island. StandardVision created four themed compositions for City of Dreams’ opening last year, and there are plans to create more content based on holidays and special events.

“The ongoing content strategy is to create a flexible library of live-action media and interactive content that can be posted to the buildings and shown at different times of year as desired,” notes Velicescu.

Louis M. Brill (louisbrill@sbcglobal.net) is a journalist and consultant for high-tech entertainment and media communications.

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All Hands on Tech Royal Caribbean cruises ahead with its biggest ship ever and an interactive wayfinding system thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s making waves.

By Jenny S. Reising

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Opposite left: Oasis of the Seas is Royal Caribbean’s $1.5 billion, 17-deck floating city. It’s the length of three football fields and holds 6,400 passengers. (Photo: Royal Caribbean International) Opposite right and bottom: Illuminated pedestal directories are signature sculptural pieces that Graboski developed for RCI nearly 30 years ago. Oasis of the Seas has eight freestanding glass-andsteel signs that show the ship’s overall layout and individual deck plans—basically an abbreviated version of the wall-mounted signs in the elevator lobbies.

Below left and right: Four Winds Interactive created 43 interactive touchscreens that complement the static signage in the elevator lobbies. The “oversized iPods” feature a vertical deck plan, information on the ship’s venues, a restaurant thermometer (to show real-time occupancy), and directions to the staterooms, with multiple language options and accessibility for disabled passengers.

OASIS OF THE SEAS Client Royal Caribbean International Location Miami Design TGADesign Design Team Tom Graboski (principal in charge); Peter Zorn (project manager); Damian Rakowsky, Cindy Reppert Ault, Keith Oliver, Geoff Rogers, David Stuart, Veronica Martin, Fabian Ospina, Marisally Santiago (designers); Beverly “Bobbie” Doran (office manager)

Fabrication STX Europe (shipbuilder, Turku, Finland); H. Maharens GmbH (primary sign fabrication and installation, Finland); SFY Architectural Signs (sign fabrication and installation, Miami); Four Winds Interactive (interactive signage); Hangmen Inc. (installation, Miami); Bunting Graphics (guest comment boxes) Photos Tom Graboski, Damian Rakowsky (except as noted)

T

he cruise ship industry has come a long way in the last few decades. While retirees dominated the passenger population 40 years ago, today’s cruises are family affairs, with guests from ages 8 to 80 and a strong international quotient. To keep the all-important repeat customers coming back for more, cruise ships are upping the ante with offerings akin to floating amusement parks.

Larger ships and expanded amenities create navigational challenges that can make or break a guest’s experience, so wayfinding plays an important role in ensuring a smooth sail.

“You can test out a signage system on day one,” says Kelly Gonzalez, associate vice president, architectural design for Royal Caribbean International. “If people are walking around dazed and confused, you’ve failed. If people find their way around intuitively and through architecture and wayfinding, you’ve succeeded.”

About six years ago, RCI began planning for Oasis of the Seas, its $1.5 billion, 17-deck floating city with five “neighborhoods” that include Central Park, a Boardwalk with carousel, a zip line, minigolf course, and ice skating rink, in addition to the de rigueur mix of entertainment, food, and retail venues. Among the challenges of building a ship the length of three football fields and with a 6,400passenger capacity are boarding all those passengers, getting them to their staterooms quickly, and orienting them to the ship’s offerings.

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Steering the course

As RCI’s go-to wayfinding designers for the last 28 years, TGADesign (Coral Gables, Fla.) knows how to create a comprehensive signage system for cruise ships. “The learning curve is steep, and the speed at which [the cruise ship industry] wants to work can drive some people crazy,” admits Tom Graboski, president.

TGADesign has signed more than 40 cruise ships, but for Oasis, the stakes were higher than ever before. “RCI was very concerned about every detail,” Graboski says. “Their worst nightmare was that people would have a bad guest experience. But nobody was about to let that happen on this ship.”

The wayfinding concept was simple: create a signage system that is there when guests need it and transparent when they don’t.

Graboski’s team designed approximately 40,000 signs for the ship— identity signs for the ship’s many venues, room identifiers, safety code signs required by a slew of regulatory agencies, and instruction signs for amenities like the zipline. About 3,000 are wayfinding signs, designed to help guests and crew get where they need to go and keep confusion to a minimum.

A major concern for cruise ship signage is durability and longevity.

RCI has a rigorous maintenance program that requires everything to be wiped down twice daily with a strong disinfectant. As Graboski puts it, “Everything has to be bullet-proof.” So his team specified glass signs screenprinted with heat-set epoxy, polycarbonate signs with subsurface colors and paints, and stainless steel signs that are built for a 10-year (or longer) life span.

Graboski approached the hierarchical wayfinding system with an awareness of the different ways that people navigate. The ship’s four quadrants are color-coded, and those colors appear in artwork, stair towers, on luggage tags, and in the wayfinding signage—all subtly working together to reinforce the location of a passenger’s stateroom.

From there, a secondary system uses symbols to identify different “neighborhoods”—for example, entertainment, food/dining, sun decks, the pool area—that then lead to specific destinations, such as the karaoke bar or the disco club.

Key components of the sign system include edge-lighted glass panels in the elevator lobbies and wall-mounted glass directories as guests enter the stateroom corridors. Illuminated pedestal directories—walk-around signs with deck plans topped by cutouts of the ship—have become a signature RCI piece and appear intermittently on public venue decks. And about every 50 feet along stateroom corridors, 550mm-diameter discs show the ship’s profile, the deck plan, and a You are Here dot. On the stateroom doors, a triangular cut in the ring around the three-digit room number points toward the front of the ship.

Uncharted territory

The most innovative aspect of the wayfinding system, however, is a network of interactive touchscreen directories, including 43 interactive displays in the elevator lobbies. Graboski had been pushing for interactive signage for a decade, and RCI had finally included some prototype interactive signage on its Freedom of the Seas cruise ships. But there was room for improvement. For Oasis of the Seas, Four Winds Interactive was brought onboard to create an interactive complement to the static wayfinding system.

Four Winds’ biggest challenge was time. Awarded the job in May 2009, Four Winds had to have signs installed that November. “It was beyond midnight oil,” recalls Heath Burr, Four Winds’ senior program manager. “We were working at full speed to get it done, but there was a sense of pride and ownership that we may never have with a project again.”

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Right: Elevator buttons incorporate neighborhood symbols (e.g., a tree for Central Park) to make wayfinding more intuitive.

Below: In the elevator lobbies, etched-glass signs measuring 1700mm high and 750mm wide are designed to blend with the interiors and withstand twice-daily disinfectant cleanings by cruise ship staff. Information is displayed hierarchically, with the lobby name and deck number at top, the ship’s deck plan, a You Are Here indicator, and a directory of the ship’s offerings by deck level.

According to Burr, the key goals for the interactive system were wayfinding, content management, and elegance—designing a transition-heavy system with a smooth, intuitive interface. Using the touchscreens, guests can get directions to their stateroom, learn about the day’s activities using the Cruise Compass, or gauge restaurant options by accessing menus and real-time occupancy rates. Sophisticated data integration allows the directories to access RCI’s back-end systems. The screens offer content in six languages to accommodate international guests, and an accessibility option brings navigation buttons down to the lower portion of the screen for disabled passengers.

Adjacent to each bank of elevators, the 46-in., wall-mounted Samsung LCD displays—some placed horizontally and some vertically, as dictated by the ship’s architecture—allow enough space for larger features, such as the ship’s deck plan, and use oversized fonts and buttons. The art direction follows RCI’s blue and yellow branding and the Graboski-designed wayfinding system, with built-in flexibility to accommodate frequent changes.

Left: Circular stateroom corridor signs use quadrant color-coding and symbols to help guests navigate to the ship’s venues.

More critical was the signs’ layout and navigation. For example, it was important that guests know which of the ship’s 18 decks they’re on at all times, so the displays feature a You are Here beacon and obvious transitions to the next deck. After a rigorous 17 rounds of revisions, Flash prototypes, user acceptance testing, and a lastminute addition of 96 screens that help guests get on and off the ship at different ports, the interactive system was ready to set sail in November 2009.

Bon voyage

Since its maiden voyage, Oasis of the Seas has been a hit with passengers, with occupancy above 6,000 all summer long. And Gonzalez attributes that success in part to a flawless wayfinding system. “We really did have all the right expertise and the right detailed focus to ensure the ship’s success,” she says. “Guests love the intuitive nature of the system.”

Below: Working with 10 different architectural firms (including Gensler on the Candy Beach façade, top right), TGADesign developed 40,000 signs for the cruise ship, from venue identities to regulatory, wayfinding, and instructional signs.

The interactive signage has been so successful that RCI is implementing an expanded system on Oasis of the Seas’ sister ship, Allure of the Seas, which will be completed in November 2010. And future plans call for increasing functionality, including adding GPS/ weather sections (like on an airplane), a webcam, and more animation.

Four Winds has also taken over the design of the cruise ships’ kiosks— where guests can print out boarding passes, view departure times, and manage luggage—and is exploring how apps and handheld devices can be incorporated into the network.

The project certainly was a life changer for Four Winds. “We were the sleeper project, but our creative team was able to blow RCI out of the water and we became the number-one customer comment on RCI’s website,” says Burr. “Customers have called it ‘the world’s largest iPhone’ because it’s transition-centric—things slide in and out—and people feel comfortable using it.”

Jenny Reising is a Cincinnati-based design writer and editor. segdDESIGN 43

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12/21/09 9:54:50 AM

Wayfinding in

Your Pocket Location-aware smartphone applications are adding a new dimension to traditional wayfinding systems.

By Leslie Wolke

Graphics for the WalkBrighton iPhone app were designed to be consistent with the system’s signage and print components.

T

Street maps don’t provide the best orientation for pedestrians, so AIG created walking maps from scratch, emphasizing landmarks and features like steps and pedestrian crossings.

he cell phone, the Internet, and GPS. In the last 20 years, these three successive technologies have transformed how we find our way through our physical environment. Having a cell phone on a car trip meant that we could call for directions if we got lost. With the arrival of MapQuest, we were able to print custom directions and take them with us. More recently, as more devices and cars are equipped with GPS, we find ourselves able to navigate virtually anywhere on the planet with confidence.

Now that the Internet and GPS have taken up residence in the cell phone, we all have access to our own personal wayfinding device. An estimated 30% of U.S. cell phone users carry smartphones (phones that can connect to the Internet and run applications), and experts say that in five years, all mobile phones will be smartphones.

Google Maps is the clear leader and innovator in maps and navigation, both on the desktop and on mobile devices. More than 100 million people a month use Google Maps on phones worldwide.

Because of vigorous competition from Microsoft and others, the Google Maps team is perpetually mobilized to improve and expand their offerings, both for consumers and for software developers, who can create specialized apps on top of the Google Maps platform.

48 segdDESIGN

The free app also includes walking circles—loops that show how long it takes to walk to various points of interest from the user’s current location.

The launch of Apple’s iPhone 3GS in June 2009 meant the personal wayfinding device was truly here—its compass and GPS made the phone “location-aware.” Developers can now create applications tuned to specific environments and fulfill users’ needs within that specific context. When the iPhone app store opened its virtual doors the previous year, the infrastructure and business models were in place to support and incentivize a new generation of app designers and developers.

Subsequent releases of the iPhone and its software, along with the debut of the first phones to use Google’s Android operating system, primed the market for a pioneering crop of wayfinding apps.

Harnessing the embedded capabilities of these mobile devices, designers, developers, and their clients are finding new and intriguing ways to enhance physical signage and wayfinding systems—while modulating the display of information to the exact needs of the user in a particular context. As our expectations for accessing location-based information on the go continue to rise, collaboration among interactive designers, environmental graphic designers, and mobile developers will drive future generations of innovative and useful apps.

Right and bottom: Applied Information Group used a “360degree” approach to its wayfinding system for the resort town of Brighton & Hove, providing signage, printed maps, downloadable maps, and an iPhone app.

(Photos: ©Philip Vile Photography)

iMapping Brighton & Hove

With an eye on these new opportunities, the multi-disciplinary firm Applied Information Group (London) saw how an iPhone app could enrich the pedestrian wayfinding system for the seaside resort city of Brighton & Hove.

AIG Founder and Creative Director Tim Fendley, who led the development of his firm’s award-winning Legible London pedestrian wayfinding system (see segdDESIGN Nos. 26 and 29), applied what he calls a “360-degree approach” to the Brighton wayfinding scheme.

The system includes signage, printed maps, downloadable maps, and an iPhone app—orchestrated to work together, using a consistent brand, visual language, and mapping aesthetic across all media.

Fendley knew that street-oriented maps would not provide the best foundation for pedestrians. Google Maps are formulated for road travel and emphasize highways and one-way streets, information that is less relevant for pedestrians. The AIG design team drafted Brighton’s maps from scratch with the goal of providing, as Fendley notes, “the highest level of detail of any walking map on mobile devices today… including features that are very important to walkers, such as steps, railings, and pedestrian crossings.”

The biggest challenge for AIG was to refine and optimize the map for use on the small screen. “Static maps can be designed for one scale and size, but digital maps need to work at multiple sizes and scales and then move seamlessly between them,” explains Fendley. “The benefit is that it also allows for information to be delivered more precisely, with greater detail revealed only when it is requested.”

The first version of WalkBrighton launched in September 2009.

The free app features a browsable walking map of Brighton complete with time circles—loops that show how long it takes to walk to various points of interest from the user’s current location. The colorful map includes 3D icons of major landmarks and there are options to display attractions, shopping, and nightlife destinations.

Brighton & Hove City Councilor David Smith says the iPhone app helps visitors feel more secure and confident about navigating the city’s maze of narrow lanes. “Research has shown that people are more likely to return to a city if they have found it easy to find their way around.”

Fendley believes wayfinding apps will become more prevalent as cities recognize the power of helping visitors feel at ease. “Good wayfinding will become a prerequisite of any modern city, and mobile devices will be on the front line when it comes to distributing information.” segdDESIGN 49

Left: The American Museum of Natural History’s Explorer is an iPhone app that helps visitors find their way through the museum’s 46 permanent exhibition halls in a complex of 26 buildings.

Right: Using Explorer, museum visitors can create custom routes to their favorite exhibits or follow pre-loaded tours. The app identifies the iPhone’s location from among more than 300 Wi-Fi hotspots in the museum.

Below left and right: Eighty percent of visitors who responded to a survey on the Explorer say it’s easy to use. AMNH offers iPhones for visitors to borrow during their visits.

Exploring the treasures of the AMNH

As one of the largest museums in the world, the American Museum of Natural History in New York faces wayfinding challenges of an extraordinary scale: 4.8 million visitors a year, a complex of 26 buildings, and 150 years worth of collections in 46 permanent exhibition halls.

According to Linda Perry-Lube, AMNH’s chief digital officer, 60% of visitors ask for directions. The enormity of the facilities means that people often spend considerable time getting to the exhibitions they want to see. If those journeys are frustrating, the overall experience may be diminished.

Perry-Lube and her colleagues realized that smartphones could be leveraged to “lessen lost time and increase engaged time.” So they commissioned consulting firm Accenture and networking giant Cisco to devise an interior wayfinding technology strategy. Since GPS doesn’t work indoors or at the precision needed to navigate within a room, the team pursued Wi-Fi triangulation—identifying a phone’s position based on the strength of surrounding Wi-Fi signals—a technology then unproven in a public setting.

While Accenture and Cisco tackled the infrastructure hurdles, mobile app developer Spotlight Mobile focused on the application features. Kiyo Kubo, Spotlight founder and CEO, knew their biggest goal was to make the app easy to learn and to use.

50 segdDESIGN

“Our philosophy is to always give good information,” Kubo explains.

But the limits of Wi-Fi triangulation meant that it was not possible to identify the visitor’s exact location in a given exhibit hall. Kubo and his team replaced a specific pinpoint, similar to the location pin on a Google map, with larger shaded crosshairs to show the general location of the visitor on the map. The design worked well in testing, and can be seen in the final app.

In July, the museum launched the AMNH Explorer for free in the iTunes store. The app identifies its location from among 300+ Wi-Fi hotspots in the museum and provides walking directions to exhibits and amenities. Maps are rendered in 2D (default) and 3D and rotate to show a heads-up orientation. Users can create custom routes of the exhibits or follow pre-loaded tours such as the popular “Night at the Museum” journey based on the film of the same name.

While the app is an important tool for visitors who choose to use it, it is not the only solution to the museum’s wayfinding challenges.

A project to revise and improve the wayfinding system is underway, with Gensler taking the lead. Perry-Lube sees the goals of the app and the signage converging to provide a better experience for visitors.

“When you knit the physical and the digital together, the results can be powerful.”

Right: Using the free myNav app, residents or visitors to Manhattan’s massive Peter Cooper Village/Stuyvesant Town residential complex can map the shortest routes to their destinations from their current location.

Above: Peter Cooper Village/Stuyvesant Town is a massive grid of 56 residential units in Manhattan. With its symmetrical plan and identical buildings, it’s notoriously difficult to navigate. (Photo: ©Microsoft Corporation)

Augmented Reality enters the picture

Head 4.4 miles south from the American Museum of Natural History (according to Google Maps, of course) and you’ll encounter Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village, an 80-acre complex of 56 residential buildings and home to about 25,000 people. To Vijay Mathews, Christopher Auyeung, and Thomas McLaughlin of Winfield & Co. (New York), this dense neighborhood seemed like the perfect proving ground to test a custom wayfinding app conceived to take advantage of iPhone’s latest enhancements. The symmetrical campus plan and uniform architecture contribute to the difficulty of getting around “Stuy Town,” as it is known to New Yorkers.

Their free iPhone app, MyNav Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village, launched in July. Like WalkBrighton, MyNav sports a custom-designed base map optimized for pedestrians, with walking paths and amenities highlighted. Users can browse or search a destination directory and generate a map that shows the shortest path to campus destinations from their current location. However, instead of listing step-by-step walking directions, the app shifts into augmented reality mode, pointing to the user’s destination as overlayed on the iPhone’s camera.

The term “augmented reality” has come to mean the display of digital information as an overlay on top of real-time imagery.

Just as early wayfinding apps utilized GPS and the compass to provide location awareness, AR applications are exploiting another smartphone feature—the camera—to provide a more intuitive user experience.

MyNav overlays directional arrows that point right or left and the distance to the destination over the “live” view of the environment on the iPhone camera’s viewfinder screen. The user holds the phone vertically and orients to face the direction of their destination and walks toward it, much like a hiker following his compass.

The capability to augment the reality around us can provide a more immersive and natural interface for wayfinding. As Matthews says, “the mobile platform is now very different from the web and the physical environment.” He believes that mobile apps complement physical wayfinding signage because “they can overcome the constraints of signs such as limited space for content and limited options to display different languages.” Applying what they learned in Stuy Town, Matthews and his partners are currently working on an app for visitors to get the most out of Central Park.

Left: A special feature provides wheelchair-accessible routing within the campus.

Right: Instead of listing step-bystep directions, myNav shifts into augmented reality mode, pointing to the user’s destination as overlayed on the iPhone’s camera.

segdDESIGN 51

iPhone time machine

Wayfinding is certainly an appropriate use of augmented reality for the here and now, but one innovative museum is employing AR to promote its collections. The Museum of London hired interactive agency Brothers and Sisters (London) to create a viral strategy to celebrate the opening of the museum’s new galleries. Creative team Kirsten Rutherford and Lisa Jelliffe decided that AR would be an excellent way to take the museum’s extensive art and photographic collections outside the museum walls via a mobile device.

The resulting app, Streetmuseum, highlights 250 London locations on an interactive Google map. Click on a pin, choose “3D view,” and an archival image from that specific viewpoint is composited

Brothers and Sisters created Streetmuseum, an iPhone app that takes the museum’s extensive collection of historical photos out of the museum and into the streets of the city.

Below and opposite: By clicking on a pin near Buckingham Palace (right) or Picadilly Circus (left), users can view history overlaid onto the current reality.

52 segdDESIGN

Users can click on pushpin icons for about 250 locations in the city and access archival photos.

translucently in real-time over today’s street scene via the camera’s viewfinder. Pan across a dense intersection, and the history of London is revealed in image after image in an eerie and fascinating way.

With more than 100,000 downloads since its debut in June, the app has apparently struck a chord with users. Helen Kimber, the museum’s new business director, says StreetMuseum has achieved its goal of “bringing the museum to the streets…prompting Londoners to visit the museum and find out more about their city which is steeped in history.”

Leslie Wolke (leslie.wolke@gmail.com) is a consultant who specializes in interactive wayfinding and donor recognition systems.

Archival images from the museum’s collections are composited translucently over photos of the current street scene.

segdDESIGN 53

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Las Ve gas City C enter,

22,000 Signs 12 Months 3 Leading design firms 1 Source AD/S When City Center calls on leading visionaries like Selbert Perkins Design, Gensler Design and Hunt Design for environmental graphic concepts to final direction, we at AD/S are honored that MGM Mirage chose us to execute their visions to become a reality. From way finding throughout the Aria Casino, lobbies, the tower, convention center to the underground experience, AD/S was able to transform these highly inspired design directions into fulfilling over 22,000 signs in less than 12 months. Through this process we were honored to have had the opportunity to work with City Center and these great design firms.

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56 segdDESIGN

Neo Las Vegas Environmental graphics quietly unify CityCenter and help define a new brand of Las Vegas urbanism. By Jennifer M. Volland

Envision a 76-acre site on one of the world’s most notorious streets. A development company commissions eight world-renowned architects, 15 fine artists, more than 250 design firms, and 9,000 construction workers to realize an unprecedented $8.5 billion “urban resort” that represents the largest privately financed project in U.S. history. It encompasses 18 million square feet of building space, a quarter-mile of frontage on the infamous Las Vegas Strip, an extensive public art and landscape program, and a network of multi-modal transportation—pedestrian, automobile, and rail.

Now imagine that you are given the task of coordinating the $32 million environmental graphics and signage program that must knit this massive project together. Amy Owen and her team faced such a task when, for almost five years, Gensler oversaw the development of the branding and graphics programs for CityCenter, the mixed-use development that opened to much fanfare in December 2009.

“This was the first time on the Strip where the slated property was to be a collection of buildings instead of one big one, and there was no dedicated theme,” explains Owen.

“Because there is so much density on the site, we had to completely change our mindsets about how people would experience it.”

segdDESIGN 57 (Photo: Jeff Green)

A new model

In CityCenter, MGM sought to advance a new model for development in Las Vegas—abandoning the glitzy, gimmicky approach of the past and instead, building an urban community whose defining feature is its architecture.

CityCenter caters to a sophisticated, growing audience that comes to Las Vegas as much for fine dining, world-class shopping, and entertainment as for gambling. CityCenter’s design reflects that level of sophistication. The complex includes iconic buildings designed by a star-studded cast of architects: luxury hotels including the Mandarin Oriental (Kohn Pedersen Fox), Aria Resort & Casino (Pelli Clarke Pelli), Vdara Hotel & Spa (Rafael Viñoly Architects), and the Harmon Hotel (Foster + Partners); the Veer Towers residences (Murphy/Jahn); and the Crystals retail center (Studio Daniel Libeskind). Interiors by the likes of the Rockwell Group, BBG-BBGM, Karim Rashid, and Adam Tihany add to its status as a high-design destination.

Many have criticized CityCenter for its dissonant mishmash of architectural styles and lack of cohesion. The experience is visually immersive, although not in the insular fashion of the traditional casino resort. Visitors are up close and personal with the buildings, the landscape, and the $42 million public art program that includes installations by the likes of Jenny Holzer, Maya Lin, Nancy Rubins, and Frank Stella.

With all this competing stimuli, environmental graphics for CityCenter had to work quietly and effectively, directing guests without distracting them. ”In the beginning, we debated the volume of the overarching CityCenter brand,” states Owen. “Would it be a master-branded destination with its own identity front and center?

Or would we allow the individual resort and tenant brands to define CityCenter, almost the way SoHo is identified by what has grown there over time?”

The debate continued as the project team developed programming criteria during the first year of planning. As this plan reached consensus, says Owen, “It became clear that the latter was the correct direction, and that our project-wide graphics and signage would be a unifying yet somewhat neutral presence.”

Directing complexity

Sven Van Assche, vice president of design for MGM Resorts International, is accustomed to managing massive developments and went through a similar design evaluation process for the Bellagio Resort & Casino in 1998. But Bellagio’s signage goals were more simplified, orchestrating the movement of guests to and within only one primary destination instead of many.

“We are numbed by the enormity of projects here in Vegas, where several thousand-room hotels are the norm,” says Van Assche. “At CityCenter we had a project three times as dense as anything we had done before, with that many more destinations, points of interest, and products, and we knew traversing the site would be that much more difficult.”

The signage program required a delicate balance: provide enough information to orient guests, but not so much that it would distract from the architectural statement or dilute the identities of the individual properties. CityCenter was split into three blocks with six primary destinations within them (in addition to the common areas). The client specified that not only each block maintain its own voice, but also each property and the literally hundreds of secondary destinations within each property. At the same time, MGM also wanted to preserve the feeling of singularity that was so boldly expressed in the architecture.

The art of communication

Long before these ideas could be implemented, a dialogue began between the design leadership teams at MGM and Gensler, which not only served as the project’s executive architect, but its lead for brand Left: CityCenter’s quarter-mile of frontage onto Las Vegas Boulevard was designed to wow visitors. There is only one access point to a multitude of destinations.

The north driveway is actually an elevated four-lane deck with the porte-cochere drop-offs for both Aria and Vdara.

This is the first time in Las Vegas that one driveway has supported two porte-cocheres.

(Photos: Jeff Green)

58 segdDESIGN

strategy, naming and identity design, and environmental graphics and signage.

Naturally, when it came to signage, MGM wanted to work with top specialists in the field. “One firm couldn’t have handled the volume of work, so we came up with a strategy for how the scope should be split,” says Owen. “In turn, we hoped the division of the work would help achieve a scalable experience for guests, and we felt it was the only way to avoid gaps and redundancies.”

This process took months and culminated in the selection of four firms for the majority of the EGD work: Selbert Perkins Design (Los Angeles), Hunt Design (Pasadena), Poulin + Morris (New York), and Two Twelve (New York). Gensler served as command central, while at the same time designed signage for the project’s common areas, Crystals, CityCenter Tram, self-service parking garage, Harmon Hotel, Residential Sales Pavilion, and massive, centralized loading dock.

The project’s complexity demanded a sophisticated organizational CITYCENTER Location Las Vegas Client MGM Resorts International Environmental Graphic Design Gensler (executive architect, brand strategy, naming and identity design, program development and signage coordination; design for site-wide wayfinding, Garage 5, CityCenter Place and Harmon Circle, Crystals, Harmon Hotel, Residential Sales Pavilion, and kiosks) Hunt Design (Veer Towers, Aria Tier 3 Suites, Aria Hotel Tower) Poulin + Morris (Mandarin Oriental Hotel) Selbert Perkins Design (Aria Resort & Casino podium, Aria Convention Center, Aria pool deck, Viva ELVIS Theatre, Sinatra Garage, project-wide back-of-house) Two Twelve (Vdara Hotel & Spa) Consultants Applied Storytelling (naming, writing), Axxess Industries (doorbell components, Vdara and Aria) Fabrication Architectural Design & Signs (Aria casino podium, back-of-house, casino venues, Aria Convention Center, Casino tower, UUX-Garage 6); YESCO (Vdara podium and porte-cochere, Mandarin Oriental podium, Frank Sinatra wayfinding, Harmon Circle wayfinding, Las Vegas Boulevard/ CityCenter wayfinding, automated people mover); Ad Art (Crystals); Ampersand (Garage 5); Casino Lighting & Sign (showroom theater, Mandarin Oriental tower); CREO (Sinatra garage); RB Industries (Aria podium pool, Aria spa/salon); Wolfpack Sign Group (Vdara tower) Photography Ryan Gobuty, Jeff Green, Jonathan Posnett, MGM Resorts International (as noted)

Right and top: Gensler’s signage for the Daniel Libeskind-designed Crystals retail and entertainment center is restrained but forceful, incorporating stainless steel letters and sculptural forms that respond to the iconic architecture. The building contains no right angles. (Photos: Jeff Green)

segdDESIGN 59

strategy. Simple two-way conversations were not possible.

Communication channels and decision chains were articulated carefully, and a typical email copied upwards of 100 individuals. A “late” response (anything more than 30 minutes) could mean that a decision had been made without you. During the most intense months of the project, Owen estimates receiving more than 150 project-related emails every day.

Communication among the numerous layers of decision-makers proved to be both the project’s Achilles heel and its crowning achievement. Even with tools such as Buzzsaw, keeping up with the numerous daily changes to the project was more than a full-time task. “We made the most of our design development documentation, but ultimately had to rely on fabricators to survey the actual built conditions before they produced anything,” explains Owen.

The team prepared rough order-of-magnitude estimates during

Below left: Wayfinding signage coexists with CityCenter’s $42 million public art program. The client asked for a restrained approach to signage, but needed to ensure guests could navigate the site. (Photo: Ryan Gobuty/ Gensler)

several phases of the project as designs progressed, which turned out to be fairly accurate. And even though signage was one of the last elements to be installed, the team was able to stay true to the initial vision despite the bleak economic forecast and capital concerns that threatened the outcome of the project as a whole.

Fabricators’ shops ran 24/7 to meet deadlines. Hometown firm Young Electric Sign Company (YESCO) produced the site-wide exterior signage as well as many areas of interior signage. Account Executive Dennis Harrison says that on typical projects, he sees designs a couple of years ahead of installation, providing plenty of time for refinement and coordination. For CityCenter, YESCO and other fabricators had to draft details and begin building from the onset.

“There was so much going on at one place at one time. It was a giant anthill. Things were shifting until the last minute and there was a lot of overlap in communication,” says Harrison. “But the complex

logistics are what made CityCenter interesting. Even the people who worked on the project are in awe of what was accomplished.”

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Below right: Sculptural sign forms signs echo the strength and fluidity of the architecture. Rather than employing the typical Las Vegas model of forcing visitors through the casino, the wayfinding system ensures that pedestrian traffic moves seamlessly through CityCenter and to destinations beyond. (Photo: Ryan Gobuty/ Gensler)

Designing restraint

Creating a successful environmental graphics program for any project in Las Vegas would be daunting. This is a city whose entire image has been built around brazen public display and the practice of one-upmanship is embedded in the development process. Visual competition abounds and CityCenter is no exception. Yet the parameters for CityCenter were different. Spectacular architecture was intended to trump bright, blinking, oversized marquees. As a result, site signage enters the race for attention with a slight disadvantage.

In many ways, the environmental graphics for CityCenter constituted an exercise in restraint. The signs are understated and subtle, and one gets a sense that they are quietly tiptoeing around their stronger neighbors, the buildings.

“The biggest mistake we’ve made is underestimating the impact of a strong graphic design program,” Van Assche concedes. “We asked the designers to be quiet, almost to the point of invisible.”

In some instances, this mandate proved to be very successful.

Owen points to the intersections between the buildings and the landscape, such as the much-cited park between Aria and Crystals that features a Henry Moore sculpture. Common areas like this serve as a palette cleanser and a place to respond to the architecture.

“From a wayfinding perspective, it isn’t just about signs,” says Owen “A lot of elements come into play—landscaping, paving, seating, the introduction of art. Wayfinding doesn’t have to work as hard when it plays with other elements.” Editing then became an integral part of the process, and helped introduce the concept of “found spaces” lacking elsewhere on the Strip.

Left: The primary columns supporting the site’s large cantilevered wayfinding signs are made of a spiral rolled stainless steel mesh typically used in industrial filtration systems.

This creative use of an existing product saved the cost of custom fabrication and, when lit from within, creates the illusion that the large signs are floating. (Photo: Jeff Green)

Signs of distinction

Signage carried more weight within the individual destinations. But Two Twelve, which created the EGD program for Vdara, the non-gaming property furthest from the Strip, had to embrace the challenges of MGM’s anti-brand mentality.

“Vdara didn’t have any overpowering qualities. It is comprised of different destinations and the client wanted to maintain that feeling,” says Jonathan Posnett, creative director for Two Twelve. “So we had one project with multiple sensibilities and the signage was the glue that held it all together.” Two Twelve used the architectural context of each area— conference center, public spaces, restaurant, guest rooms, spa, etc.—to establish distinct zones, only loosely connected to each other by elements such as related typefaces.

Another way the EGD teams achieved placemaking was through the use of materials. Selbert Perkins Design developed an extensive EGD program of more than 7,000 signs that navigate guests through Aria, including its 150,000-sq.-ft. casino, 300,000sq.-ft. convention center, spa, pool deck, parking garage, numerous restaurants, bars and lounges, and the Viva ELVIS Cirque de Soleil Theatre.

Such massive spaces can feel impersonal to guests.

But Selbert Perkins Principal Andrew Davey says the firm wanted to reflect CityCenter’s sophisticated image while using sustainable materials and processes in support of the development’s LEED aspirations.

“One aspect that made it more human was the use of wood—real reclaimed wood that was 100 years old and had nail holes,” says Davey. “Even something as utilitarian as a sign becomes personal when you add some warmth.”

The firm also used environmentally preferable products such as aluminum and low-voltage, LED illumination.

Moving people amidst chaos

Whereas the overall visual approach to signage was restrained, MGM knew that providing effective wayfinding was important. Las Vegas can be a dizzying, disorienting experience. At most casinos, it takes all of five seconds to find a blackjack table, but it can take an hour to find a latte or even longer to find a door to the outside.

Simply entering the complex is fraught with obstacles. The absence of a marquee on Las Vegas Boulevard is the most noticeable difference between this project and its neighbors. And it constitutes the biggest risk, since marquees have been the main form of advertisement on The Strip. But MGM’s decision stemmed from a desire to make the project seem more like a neighborhood.

Above and left: Designers had to deal with tremendous ranges of scale and purpose, from a superscaled marquee along the freeway to very quiet room identification signage, all of which had to exemplify the CityCenter brand.

(Photos: Ryan Gobuty/Gensler)

segdDESIGN 61

Two Twelve’s environmental graphics for the Vdara Hotel & Spa were designed to support the hip and high-end atmosphere created by Rafael Viñoly Architects, but speak softly. Cabana signs feature letters cut directly from 3form’s 100 Percent. Outside event rooms, polished stainless steel

Access challenges abounded. There is only one curb cut on the Strip for four of the destination buildings at CityCenter. The entrance is a veritable freeway unto itself, with four to five lanes of traffic in each direction. To ease confusion, Gensler strategically deployed signage to peel cars off at various destinations, so that by the time guests arrive at the top, there is only one option left, Aria’s Valet—the site of the complex’s only casino. The site’s north arrival is actually an elevated circular roadway with entrance and exit ramps. It is also the only driveway in Las Vegas to service two porte-cocheres.

“It’s an incredibly complex area, with public and private lanes comingling. We worked with the civil and traffic engineers for nearly a year to design something that would truly work for every user,” says Owen.

While Las Vegas developers are typically more concerned with their guest’s comfort once they’re inside the building, with CityCenter, “We had to communicate a lot more information to people while they’re still driving,” adds Owen. “With all the sensory distractions competing for drivers’ attention, we recognized the enormity of this challenge.”

The navigation hurdles continued on the interiors. The design leadership team spent weeks vetting ways to number the guest floors in Aria. Because it is shaped as intersecting arcs that create four wings, the footprint made it difficult to come up with an intelligible system.

Jennifer Bressler, principal of Hunt Design explains: “The experience is counterintuitive. We couldn’t use an east/west directional because there are no indicators that you just crossed over, like a corner. We had to place a bigger role on the signs than in a conventional hotel, and the users are directed by logical sequences.”

For all of the effort put into maintaining the individual identities of each property, there is one common thread that runs throughout the entire project: the 17,000 back-of-house signs, which were designed by Selbert Perkins and fabricated by Architectural Design 62 segdDESIGN

letters are embedded flush to slim wood-faced lightbox panels. The identity sign for the Karim Rashiddesigned Silk Road restaurant is incorporated into Rashid’s sculptural fiberglass seating that flows into the “street.” (Photos: Jonathan Posnett/Two Twelve)

& Signs (AD/S, Corona, Calif.). In a place like Las Vegas, this aspect is more important than you might think. Back-of-house constitutes a city within a city, driving everything from efficient room service and security to equipment maintenance and employee retention.

“Signage is like the icing on the cake—people forget about all the work it takes to get there,” says Jeff Debough, executive vice president of AD/S. The company had two people on the site every day for two years, monitoring the progress and resolving conflicts as they arose day to day. Debough can attest to the tremendous amount of coordination required for the CityCenter job: he still has 6,000 emails sitting in his inbox.

An afterthought

As Debough reminds us, telling the real story behind any project isn’t only about the “what,” but also the “how.” CityCenter’s environmental graphics program was likely the largest, most diverse, and most expensive of its kind ever accomplished. Yet press coverage of CityCenter, which has not ceased since the opening a year ago, gravitates toward the end result.

Once installed, the signage became instantly absorbed by its surroundings and critical to the functionality of the site. It helped create a new visual language for Las Vegas, one that relies increasingly upon intuition rather than impulse. Like it or not, the experience of CityCenter is unparalleled in Las Vegas, and ultimately, it is the connective tissue of signage and environmental graphics—and the process behind the vision—that helps us navigate this uncharted territory.

Jennifer Volland is a freelance writer and curator based in Long Beach, Calif. She co-authored the book Long Beach Architecture: The Unexpected Metropolis. Her current work focuses on the history of hotel culture and how it has been shaped by architecture and design.

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Flying High

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An executive retreat center near Dayton, Ohio, nods to the regionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s aviation heritage and uses architecture, graphics, and interpretive design to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit.

By Pat Matson Knapp

I

am’s pet food billionaire Clay Mathile had a vision: share his own success in the business world by creating a retreat where leaders of small businesses could escape the day-to-day pressures of running their companies to focus on strategic planning and bluesky thinking.

When it came to naming the venture, Mathile found flight metaphors an obvious choice. Iams was headquartered in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio—the cradle of aviation—and when Mathile decided to build a campus for his center for entrepreneurial education, he chose a farmland setting outside the small city. He named the center Aileron—fittingly, the part of the airplane wing that helps lift and guide it during flight.

When Lee Skolnick, Lee Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership (New York) was selected to work with Mathile and Aileron’s stakeholders from the early planning stages, he recognized a rare opportunity to infuse the center’s architecture, graphic identity, and interpretive components with the essence of the Aileron mission.

“It was the chance to integrate all the design mediums in one project and test the ability of design to tell a story in a very implicit and organic way,” says Skolnick. “We wanted to build a narrative, a choreographic structure that would allow users to see Aileron’s meaning and purpose in everything around them.”

Taking flight

Opposite: Visitors don’t see the infinity pond until they’re well inside the building. From a second-floor vantage point, the word FOCUS becomes clear. (Photo: Alan Karchmer)

Top: The $30 million Aileron center for entrepreneurial education, outside Dayton, Ohio, seems to hover over the surrounding farmland. Signature zinc-clad, wing-inspired roof forms are part of the design vocabulary that infuses all aspects of the campus. (Photo: Alan Karchmer)

Above: Skolnick designed the winding entry sequence that serves as a decompression zone for busy entrepreneurs. Along the drive, the Aileron marquee—11-in.-deep, LED-lit stainless steel letters—is embedded in a grassy knoll.

(Photo: Ryan Kurtz)

Known to Mathile for his work in museum exhibition design, Skolnick was initially asked to present a proposal for an exhibit chronicling Mathile’s life achievements and his mantra of “Learning, Doing, Giving (Back).” Instead, Skolnick helped him envision a complete experience for Aileron users—one that would use the site, landscape, building, interiors, and graphics—to tell Aileron’s story. segdDESIGN 65

Below: Interior signs were designed for simplicity and interchangeability.

Nordquist created a paintedaluminum channel extrusion to receive faceplates of backpainted matte iced acrylic, with vinyl letters applied to the front surfaces. (Photo: Ryan Kurtz)

Below: The Entrepreneur’s Journey is an exhibit space focusing on the life of Aileron founder Clay Mathile, who transformed Iams pet food into a $900 million global brand before selling it to Procter & Gamble in 1999. (Photo: Alan Karchmer)

“We knew our mission and values, but what Lee and his team brought to the table was a rigorous process of thinking through the user experience and how the physical setting could enhance that,” says Aileron President Joni Fedders.

Skolnick was hired for the complete design of the $30 million campus, from logo and stationery to the building’s architecture, interiors, and environmental graphics. Skolnick and his team spent several months immersed in the Aileron mission, talking to the founder, his faculty, and potential users about entrepreneurship and what it means. A business owner himself and the son of a Russian immigrant who started his own business in the U.S. and made it successful, Skolnick says the project resonated deeply with him.

“We knew the Aileron experience had to celebrate the basic qualities of entrepreneurs: their ability to dream big, to see the big picture, to persevere, to meet philanthropic obligations, to think outside the 66 segdDESIGN

AILERON Client Aileron Location Dayton, Ohio Design and Architecture Lee H. Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership Design Team Lee H. Skolnick (principal in charge); Paul S. Alter, Jo Ann Secor (principals); Joern Truemper (project architect); Alethea Cheng (project manager); Miguel Cardenas, Peter Hyde (designers); Maja Gilberg (interpretive specialist); Christina Lyons (graphic designer); Dorothy Williams Neagle (interior designer); Shawn Walsh (architectural designer); Doug Hassebroek, Huerta Neals (architects)

Consultants John Poe Architects (associate architects), Brackett Builders (general contractor), Buro Happold (engineers), Vivian Llambi & Associates (landscape architect), Renfro Design Group (lighting), Jaffe Holden Acoustics (acoustical), Cortina Productions (media and interactive), Otte Enterprises (natural resource consultant), Clarient Group (A/V), Harriet Spear (signage) Fabrication Nordquist (exterior and regulatory signs), Exhibit Concepts (exhibits and interior graphics), Matthews Bronze (bronze elements), Photo Lab Inc. (digital graphics) Photos Alan Karchmer, Ryan Kurtz (as noted)

box, to take risks, to make decisions, to focus, and to nurture the dreams of others.”

Through their research and extensive interviews, the Skolnick team generated a list of 13 words and phrases that embody the spirit of entrepreneurship. These words became the visual and metaphorical underpinning of the space, from the entry drive to the meeting spaces and everywhere in between.

Making the journey

Skolnick sited the campus on the 114-acre property to leverage the bucolic setting and to create a measured entry sequence that heightens visitors’ sense of getting away from it all. The choreographed “decompression zone” also mirrors the twists and turns that an entrepreneur’s journey can sometimes take.

Beginning with a bridge and the sight of an old hackberry tree in

Far left: Exterior wayfinding signs—including vertical blades that echo the Aileron shape found in the architecture—are double 1/4-in. aluminum faces mounted onto 1-in. tube, with vinyl lettering. (Photo: Ryan Kurtz) Left: As part of the project’s LEEDGold certification, etched-aluminum interpretive panels explain some of the campus’ sustainable features.

(Photo: Ryan Kurtz)

the distance, the driveway winds through a meadow and a stand of old trees, over a wetland revitalized as part of the project, and past the Aileron identity marquee, a set of 11-in.-deep stainless steel letters embedded into a grassy knoll. It’s a while before visitors even catch a glimpse of the signature zinc-clad aerodynamic roof forms hovering like wings over the low-slung, 70,000-sq.-ft. Aileron building.

Skolnick’s architecture is of the earth, using limestone quarried near the site and organic volumes that hug the farmland. Warm, locally sourced materials and an intentionally meandering floorplan help imbue the LEED Gold-certified building with the sense that it is revealing its secrets to visitors as they pass through. For example, visitors don’t notice the dramatic infinity pond behind the building until they are well inside. Even then, it takes a second-floor vantage point to notice the large-scale letters shimmering from the bottom of the pond: FOCUS.

Below left: The Dream Room encourages blue-sky thinking.

Cantilevered over the infinity pond, it provides the blue sky via a digital mural printed by Photo Lab Inc., Cincinnati. (Photo: Ryan Kurtz) Below right: In the teak-lined Risk Corridor, entrepreneurs walk through fire via a rear-projection video display embedded in the floor. (Photo: Alan Karchmer)

In and outside the box

Aileron’s “narrative journey” continues inside the building, where natural materials reinforce the connection between outdoors and in, and environmental graphics reflect the entrepreneurial qualities the center is founded on.

The bronze reception desk incorporates resin panels embedded with grain, harkening to the site’s former purpose. A few steps away, the center’s 300-seat auditorium is themed around the concept of the Big Picture. The Skolnick team commissioned high-resolution aerial photos of the surrounding countryside, then reproduced them on acoustical fabric encasing the room. This gesture was a literal translation of one of Mathile’s core philosophies: that the only way for an entrepreneur to succeed is to view his business from 30,000 feet up.

Entrepreneurs also need to think outside the box, so Skolnick designed breakout spaces as literal glass boxes that blur the lines segdDESIGN 67

between indoors and out. The trunk of an old locust tree excavated from the site stretches across much of one breakout room, the roughhewn end inside the room and the honed end continuing through a glass wall to an outdoor courtyard. “This was also designed to get entrepreneurs thinking about transitioning their businesses from a rough state to a more formalized vision,” notes JoAnn Secor, Skolnick’s director of museum services.

And since dreaming big is another important quality for an entrepreneur, the team created the Dream Room to actively encourage it. Cantilevered over the infinity pond, the room features a wall-to-ceiling digital canvas of blue skies, clouds, and one of Mathile’s favorite quotes: “Dream no little dreams for they have no magic to move men’s souls.”

Two Journey Corridors add to the entrepreneurial narrative. The Risk Corridor is wrapped in teak from wall to ceiling, except for a 4- by 5-ft. video screen embedded in the floor. To reach the Aileron boardroom (where mock board meetings are staged as part of the training), attendees must walk through fire, negotiate treacherous ice floes, or cross deep ravines.

The familiar Aileron shape and references to entrepreneurial qualities are touchstones throughout the space, says Christina Lyons, Skolnick’s director of graphic design. “Every move we made, from the architecture to the graphic elements, came back to the Aileron and how it is a metaphor for the entrepreneur. That was the foundation for our design language.”

Layered storytelling: exhibits and signage

Exhibit elements and signage provided more opportunities for telling the Aileron story. The exhibition element that started Skolnick’s project is manifested in a semicircular space that follows Mathile’s

The sculptural exterior signs were a case of complex simplicity. To make the roll-forming possible, Nordquist sourced softer 6061 alloy aluminum plate, then had it annealed to make it more malleable. The signs were formed of two plates whose seams were ground to appear seamless.

(Photo: Lee H. Skolnick Architecture + Design)

life and accomplishments. The space features a curved metal timeline, dimensional stainless steel letters, and display cases with backlit transparencies behind graphics inkjet printed on acrylic.

Elsewhere, exhibit-like elements punctuate the space, blurring the lines between architecture, graphics, and signage.

“The majority of the space is like a museum, with multiple layers of information and themed elements,” says Marvin Mescher, project manager for Exhibit Concepts (Vandalia, Ohio). An abundance of curves and materials such as bronze and acid-etched glass meant

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68 segdDESIGN

the team had to pay close attention to tolerances and coordinate extensively with subcontractors.

Exterior signage guides visitors through the grounds and around a network of walking trails designed to provide entrepreneurs with the space to think and be inspired by nature.

Understated and in keeping with the materials palette and sensibility of the overall campus, the sculptural, painted-aluminum sign forms incorporate dimensional letters and screenprinted and acid-etched graphics. A series of interpretive signs explain the sustainable features of the campus, earning Aileron points toward LEED Gold certification. Others provide the inspirational quotes that founder Mathile loves.

In spite of their simple elegance, the signs were complex to fabricate, says Gary Stemler, vice president of Nordquist. The sculptural identity signs were designed to allude to the Aileron shape. To achieve the look, Nordquist knew roll-forming would be necessary. So the team sourced softer 6061 alloy aluminum plate, then had it annealed to make it more malleable. The signs were formed from two ¾-in.-thick plates whose seams were then ground to a V shape, filled, and ground again to appear seamless.

“It looks deceptively simple, but it takes a high level of craft to make something that appears so light still be structurally sound and hold up to the elements,” Stemler notes.

Mission accomplished

Aileron president Fedders says business at the center has increased 30 percent in the past two years, and while the growth of education in general is part of the equation, she also credits the physical environment Skolnick designed.

Aileron users agree. Dawn Dutcher Schwartzman, president of

Aileron users are encouraged to wander the network of nature trails on the beautiful campus. Occasional signs bear Clay Mathile’s favorite quotes.

(Photo: Lee H. Skolnick Architecture + Design)

Enriching Spaces (Cincinnati), a commercial interiors company, has attended courses at the campus. “Driving in for the first time, I was gearing myself up for two days of being sequestered in a typical bland training room,” she remembers. “But as soon as you start up the driveway, you understand you’re in for an unexpected experience.

Everything about the environment—from the incredible landscape to the beautiful materials and furnishings, inspirational quotes, and branding graphics—supports Aileron’s mission and reminds you why you’re there.“

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We Speak Together A groundbreaking research effort produces universal symbols for health-care settings—and underscores the value of evidence-based design.

by Pat Matson Knapp

P

atients, family members, and other visitors entering the doors of a hospital or other health-care facility face a daunting environment. Between them and their final destination, they will encounter a series of obstacles: multiple elevator banks, long and often identical-looking corridors, complex routes to distant departments or buildings, and often, ineffective wayfinding signage.

If they speak little or no English or can’t read, the stress is magnified dramatically.

Today, providing services to LEP or low-reading populations is one of the most challenging issues facing health-care administrators. This communication problem will continue to grow along with immigrant and migrant populations in the United States. A 2008 Pew Research Center report projected that by 2050, 19% of the U.S. population will be immigrants, compared with 12% in 2005.

“Making signage easy to understand and eliminating language barriers is one simple way we can improve the health-care experience for everyone,” says Yolanda Partida, director of Hablamos Juntos, an organization established in 2001 to develop practical tools to overcome language barriers to health care.

While a growing list of federal and state laws require health delivery organizations to respond to the language needs of their patients, few offer specific guidelines for accomplishing this. “There are limits to how many languages can be presented effectively on wayfinding signage,” explains Partida. “Universal symbols offer an alternative to bilingual or trilingual signage that can quickly become useless with unreadable font sizes.”

Above: The university consortium for symbols research and design was the first of its kind. Students from four university design schools in three states bridged geography, time zones, academic calendars, and course offerings to create 155 candidate symbols for the Phase II Universal Symbols in Health Care.

How do you visually represent something as abstract and invisible as mental health? This was a challenging topic for the university students. Sketches

by Iowa State students (right) illustrate how the designers approached icons via conceptual attributes such as openness, happiness, balance, or healing.

The final symbol design (far left) depicts a head with gears inside.

70 segdDESIGN

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administration

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% Hablamos Juntos and SEGD have been working together since 2003 to develop universal symbols for use in health-care settings.

In October, the second phase of this multi-faceted research effort culminated in the introduction of an expanded set of 54 symbols and a guidebook designed to help health-care facilities implement the symbols effectively. page 2 of 12

Mexico City origins

Partida’s idea to develop symbols for health-care facilities was inspired by environmental graphic design. During two visits she made to Mexico City in the 1970s and again in 2000, she noticed how Lance Wyman’s cultural icons for the Mexico City Metro had prevailed for more than 30 years, growing with the subway system.

“I thought, if symbols worked so well for a subway system, couldn’t they work for hospitals too?”

Universal Symbols: Phase I

In 2003, with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Hablamos Juntos commissioned JRC Design (Phoenix) to prepare a white paper on the feasibility of using symbols for health-care wayfinding. JRC’s analysis concluded not only that symbols were a viable option, but that a set of tested symbols, publicly available,

The revised ISO test presented five candidate symbols choices for each referent. Survey respondents were asked to rate each symbol according to the percentage of people they think would understand it to represent the referent. This mimics a realworld wayfinding scenario, where a patient knows he or she is looking for a specific destination and is scanning the environment for a symbol that seems to best communicate that message.

would give designers and health-care facilities a much-needed alternative to typical word signage.

Hablamos Juntos and SEGD formed an ongoing partnership to develop and test the use of universal symbols in health-care facility signage. Phase I of the Universal Symbols in Health Care research, completed in 2006, resulted in a set of 28 Universal Symbols in Health Care.

“Testing showed that patients found signage incorporating graphic symbols easier to understand than purely text-based signage,” says Craig Berger, SEGD’s director of education and Partida’s co-project manager on the research effort. “But after the release of the original USHC set, it became clear that the selection, design, and integration of symbols into one unified set that could be adopted universally in health-care facilities would be an ongoing process.”

Health-care facilities that adopted the initial symbol set helped identify the challenges and issues of implementing symbols in health-care settings—such as how to add and integrate new symbols into existing symbol sets in use, how to most effectively name destinations, how to develop symbols that can support multiple destinations, and how to develop symbols that can serve a diversity of functions, including emphasizing health or illness.

The highest-scoring symbols tended to fall into two categories: iconic or narrative. The highestscoring symbols for ophthalmology used either simple icons (left and middle) or a strong complex narrative (right).

segdDESIGN 71

Universal Symbols in Health Care Universal Universal Symbols Symbols in Health in Health Care Care Clinical & Clinical Medical&Services Medical Services Clinical & Clinical Medical& Medical Services Services CM01 CM02 CM03 CM04 CM05 CM06 CM07 CM08 CM09 CM10 CM11 CM12 CM13 CM14 CM15 CM16 CM17 CM18 CM19 CM20 CM21 CM22 CM23 CM24 CM25 CM26 CM27 CM28 CM29 CM30 CM31 CM32

Health CM01 Services Health Services Care CM02 Staff Area Care Staff Area Intensive CM03 Care Intensive Care Inpatient CM04 Inpatient Outpatient CM05 Outpatient Pharmacy CM06 Pharmacy Diabetes CM07 (Education) Diabetes (Education) Family CM08 Practice Family Practice Immunizations CM09 Immunizations Nutrition CM10 Nutrition Alternative CM11 / Alternative / Complementary Complementary Laboratory CM12 Laboratory Pathology CM13 Pathology Oncology CM14 Oncology Ophthalmology CM15 Ophthalmology Mental CM16 Health Mental Health Neurology CM17 Neurology Dermatology CM18 Dermatology Ear, Nose CM19& Throat Ear, Nose & Throat Respiratory CM20 Respiratory Internal CM21 Medicine Internal Medicine Kidney CM22 Kidney Cardiology CM23 Cardiology Women’s CM24 Health Women’s Health LaborCM25 & Delivery Labor & Delivery Pediatrics CM26 Pediatrics Genetics CM27 Genetics Infectious CM28Diseases Infectious Diseases Dental CM29 Dental Anesthesia CM30 Anesthesia Surgery CM31 Surgery Physical CM32 Therapy Physical Therapy

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Facilities & Facilities & Administrative Administrative Services Services FA01 FA02 FA03 FA04 FA05 FA06 FA07 FA08 FA09 FA10 FA11 FA12

Emergency FA01 Emergency Ambulance FA02 Ambulance Registration FA03 Registration Waiting FA04 Area Waiting Area Administration FA05 Administration Medical FA06 Records Medical Records BillingFA07 Billing Medical FA08 Library Medical Library Health FA09 Education Health Education Interpreter FA10 Services Interpreter Services SocialFA11 Services Social Services Chapel FA12 Chapel

Imaging Imaging MA01 Radiology MA01 Radiology MA02 Mammography MA02 Mammography MA03 Cath MA03 Lab Cath Lab MA04 MRI /MA04 PET MRI / PET MA05 Ultrasound MA05 Ultrasound MA06 Imaging MA06 (Root Imaging Category) (Root Category) MA07-10 Imaging MA07-10 (Alternatives) Imaging (Alternatives) CM31

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The final Phase II Universal Symbols in Health Care (USHC) set—as well as an implementation guidebook and research documentation—is available for download free from the SEGD website: http://www. segd.org/#/learning/hablamosjuntos.html

Produced by

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CM23

CM24

FA07

FA08

MA07

MA08

CM29

CM30

FA09

FA10

MA09

MA10

FA11

FA12

segdDESIGN 73

Top: At Women & Infants Hospital, part of a large health-care campus in Providence, R.I., wayfinding user testing focused on improving patient safety and satisfaction and expanding and enhancing an existing symbols-based system.

Bottom: During testing, the new symbols were found useful by patients from extremely diverse linguistic backgrounds, including English, Spanish, Khmer, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Somali, and Korean.

Middle: At Children’s Memorial Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., wayfinding recommendations focused on consistently locating directories at key decision points, limiting the sizes of symbols used, and placing symbols in consistent locations on the signs.

Toward universal adoption: Phase II

These questions became the focus for a second phase of research, begun in 2008. With continued funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio, in addition to support from the SEGD Education Foundation, Phase II research was designed to develop a symbols set that could be widely adopted by health-care facilities serving LEP or limited-reading populations.

The project’s goals were to add 20 to 30 new symbols to the Universal Symbols in Health Care set and support implementation of the expanded symbols set in four Innovator Health Care Facilities that signed on as partners to the project. Just as important, Phase II was designed to document best practices and promote awareness of symbols-based wayfinding as a solution for multilingual environments.

Four Innovator Health Care Facilities served as test cases for symbol design and implementation: Women & Infants Hospital (Providence, R.I.), International Community Health Service (Seattle), Children’s Mercy Hospital (Kansas City, Mo.), and Grady Memorial Hospital (Atlanta). They fully underwrote the costs of participation and implementation of the systems in their facilities.

Symbol design: clarity over creativity

In 2008, a first-of-its-kind university consortium was formed to develop a process for adding new symbols to the USHC set, essentially providing a sustainable framework for ongoing symbol design and evaluation.

Research and initial design took place in 2009 and 2010 at four universities with design schools: University of Cincinnati, Iowa State University, Kent State University, and California Polytechnic State University. Hablamos Juntos, SEGD, and the schools met in bi-weekly phone conferences to establish project goals, discuss logistics, divide responsibilities, and share pedagogy. Faculty at the four schools worked together to develop curriculum to support the research, including pre-research work focused on symbology, precedent studies, and pictogram design.

As the university teams began immersing themselves in the basics of symbol design and cross-cultural communication, students discovered the core challenge of symbol design, says Lisa Fontaine, associate professor of design at Iowa State University and the consortium’s research lead.

“We know that symbol systems have tremendous potential for cross-cultural communication, as is evident in airports, Olympic venues, and other places with diverse groups,” says Fontaine.

“But the extreme simplicity of symbols also creates the risk of miscommunication. While the students had experience with some aspects of graphic illustration, they weren’t accustomed to the restraints that would be placed on them stylistically, and getting them to prioritize clarity over creativity was a huge hurdle.”

74 segdDESIGN

Right: At Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, the analyses led to recommendations that signs show a distinct destination hierarchy including buildings, zones, major destinations, support destinations, and room addresses. This allows no more than eight distinct symbols in any one zone.

Below right: Experience analyses and testing showed that directories at most facilities were too small to be useful. Here, a larger prototype directory sign at Grady Memorial was more effective than the existing directory.

The visual foundation for the symbols had already been set during Phase I. Because of public familiarity with existing U.S. Department of Transportation symbols, the Phase I symbols were based on them stylistically, “and we knew we were continuing that path,” Fontaine adds.

The core design work was creating symbols for 19 additional referents that Hablamos Juntos had identified. Symbols for 22 new referents were ultimately created.

The teams began with an in-depth review of destination hierarchies at the four Innovator sites, including building identity, building wings or units, primary destinations (departments and key functions), support destinations (restrooms, administration, cafeteria, etc.), and room numbers. They assessed and analyzed the existing USHC set according to various parameters such as point of view, pictographic style, use of symbolic elements, representational types, human-form treatments, and the grid structure and ratio of black to white.

Another challenge was widely divergent hospital cultures and referent nomenclature. For example, one hospital might have a kidney center that includes dialysis, while others do not.

User-based testing

The teams generated 155 candidate symbols for 22 referents. These were narrowed to five candidate symbols per referent category by a Delphi panel consisting of 24 expert reviewers (12 designers and 12 non-designers) who had been involved in aspects of either Phases I or II. Delphi panelists used a web link to access an online survey.

The narrowed list of candidate symbols underwent comprehensibility testing by a linguistically diverse group of users at three sites, conforming to Institutional Review Board (IRB) procedures at each. For consistency, the same International Standards Organization (ISO) 9186-2:2007 testing methodology used for Phase I was employed in Phase II, with slight visual modifications to make the testing faster and easier.

As a result of the comprehensibility testing, 22 symbols were chosen as additions to the original USHC set.

Final symbols: Ultimate Symbol

Symbol designer Mies Hora (Ultimate Symbol) was engaged to design the final set of symbols. Working closely with the academic research teams, Hablamos Juntos, and SEGD, Hora presented refinements, enhancements, and alternate symbol elements to the team before consolidating the consensus decisions in the final symbol artwork.

Hora also revisited the 28 Phase I symbols and, using the new symbols as a guide, refined the older set for consistency in overall design, including subject-to-field size considerations, line weights, and element styling. In this way, the two sets were fully integrated into a new set of ets of is a comprehensive, 54-symbol set that adheres to internationally recognized symbol design standards.

“The symbols library will always remain a work in progress,” says Berger, “But we achieved the goal of developing a set of symbols that will achieve acceptance among designer and facility managers, and creating an ongoing capacity for adding new symbols.”

Real-world application

The Phase II research also focused on implementing the symbols effectively in the Innovator Health Care Facilities and documenting the lessons they learned in the process. A series of technical reports was developed to document the analyses, along with an implementation guidebook that outlines the steps in developing an effective symbols-based wayfinding system.

Corbin Design (Traverse City, MI) conducted experience analyses that served as the basis for wayfinding system development at the Innovator sites. Corbin also provided technical input during design and implementation.

Corbin’s pre-design analyses documented visitor and staff perceptions of the existing wayfinding experience through in-depth interviews and established a baseline for comparison. From this analysis, wayfinding strategy recommendations were developed for each of the facilities. Post-design analyses tested visitors’ experiences using a prototype version of the final wayfinding program. Recommendations from these results were incorporated into the final design processes for each of the Innovator facilities.

Incorporating user input into the process is a key aspect of the research effort, says Sherwood “Woody” Smith, Corbin’s research lead on the project. “Often these facilities invest a great deal of segdDESIGN 75

One of the key research findings was that users need to “learn” to match symbols to their referent destinations. Hospitals can help by providing supportive resources such as printed handouts, simplified maps, and human assistance to augment their wayfinding systems.

money and resources into wayfinding systems. If they haven’t been designed with user input and/or been tested to make sure they actually work, they can cause more harm than good.”

After each of the facilities developed their specific design concepts, Philip Garvey of the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute analyzed the recommendations based on several criteria: the size of a comprehensible symbol set; permissible terminology approaches for destination names linked to the symbols; recommendations for symbol size and position on wayfinding and identification signs; recommendations for the use of multiple languages in coordination with symbol signs; and use of directories, print, web, and educational support for symbols. The analyses were incorporated into specific recommendations the facilities used to develop their final sign designs.

“Ultimately we saw that symbols can be effective across a variety of populations and in a variety of facility types,” says Mark VanderKlipp, president of Corbin Design. “For users who had little or no English, in many cases the symbols were more effective than text translations into their primary language. And surprisingly, we found that sometimes, symbols alone were more effective than symbols and text.”

Smith says the research showed that user testing emphasized that people must “learn” the symbols. “Signage systems need to be supported by tools that help users match the symbols with their destinations,” he explains. “Printed handouts, hospital directories, and web-based communications should be used to support and reinforce the symbol systems. Staff training is also a crucial element—staff need to know the symbols and be able to help patients and visitors use them.”

And finally, says Smith, symbols are only as effective as the wayfinding systems they support. “Ultimately, the symbols themselves only work when the fundamental wayfinding system works. There is no replacement for good design.”

The case for evidence-based design

The USHC effort also underscores the importance and need for evidence-based design. “User-center and evidence-based design is becoming more and more important, and we’d like it to be a major focus of what we do going forward,” says Iowa State’s Fontaine. “We feel like that’s really where design is going, and graphic design needs to get up to speed. Industrial and interior design are way ahead of us on this.”

Partida agrees, and urges the environmental graphic design community to embrace evidence-based design. “The notion of making this research process evidence-based became part of our culture early on,” she notes. “If we’re going to spend this kind of money and ask hospitals to do the same, how can we begin to ensure that what we’re recommending will really work?”

76 segdDESIGN

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If you are interested in a next-generation wayfinding experience, contact Identity Group for more information.

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segdDESIGN 77

no. 30

Out There

Innovative Materials, Products, and Technology RFID Wayfinding

Identity Group (Cookeville, Tenn.) has introduced its new Automated Passive Wayfinding System, an RFID-based wayfinding solution designed to help visitors, patients, and others navigate through complex environments such as hospitals and health-care campuses.

When visitors enter the hospital, they are given a user alias (for security purposes) and an identification badge embedded with an RFID antenna. As they walk through the facility or campus, their badge is detected by a series of ceiling-mounted RFID antenna that can “read” the badges within 5 to 8 meters.

At key decision points, such as hallway intersections, digital signs mounted to the walls or on fixtures display text, arrows, and icons specific to the visitor’s destination.

Between visitors, the displays default to common destination information.

Typefaces, arrows, and symbols can be displayed consistent with static wayfinding signage. Because the system is in real time, text directions can be provided in the visitor’s preferred language. And because construction is a way of life in many hospital environments, instructions can be revised to incorporate detours.

Tim Thomas, executive vice president of Identity Group, emphasizes that the RFID system in no way replaces static signage.

Instead, it’s designed to support and enhance it. “It allows real-time secure personalization of the journey,” he notes. “And it can also help eliminate naming confusion for departments and functions and reduce information overload for visitors.” http://www.identitygroup.com/passivewayfinding/

Visitors are given a secure user alias and a badge embedded with RFID antennae.

Between visitors, the LCD or LED displays default to standard wayfinding mode.

78 segdDESIGN

As they walk through the campus, a grid of readers detect their RFID antenna and control digital signs directing them to their destination.

no. 30

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segdDESIGN 79

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Making the Cut

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Symbols included in the new Universal Symbols in Health Care set (see story, p. 70) were chosen by a linguistically diverse group of users who ranked five candidate icons in each referent category. Top-scoring symbols (shown here in black) surpass rigorous ISO standards. Composite scores (for all language groups) are in red; English speaker scores are in gray below.*

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*The selected symbols were later refined for inclusion in the USHC, so the symbols shown are not final.

Source: Universal Symbols in Health Care Symbol Design Research Report, Appendix A (available at www.segd.org/#/learning/hablamos-juntos.html) Page layout: Justin Molloy, signitecture .& i[]Z:;I?=D

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