Wayfinding
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Wayfinding encompasses all of the ways in which people and animals orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place.
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Historical
Historically, wayfinding refers to the techniques used by travelers over land and sea to find relatively unmarked and often mislabeled routes. These include but are not limited to dead reckoning, map and compass, astronomical positioning and, more recently, global positioning.Template:Citation needed
Urban planning
Urban planner Kevin A. Lynch borrowed the term for his 1960 book Image of the City, where he defined wayfinding as “a consistent use and organization of definite sensory cues from the external environment”.
In 1984 environmental psychologist Romedi Passini published the full-length "Wayfinding in Architecture" and expanded the concept to include signage and other graphic communication, clues inherent in the building's spatial grammar, logical space planning, audible communication, tactile elements, and provision for special-needs users.
This term is also used in reference to parking management strategies that help drivers find parking garages.
Indoor wayfinding
Indoor wayfinding in modern large public buildings is commonly noted as indoor navigation with indoor maps or building directory. More common is offering visitors indoor maps for handheld mobile devices and also information kiosk systems.
Polynesia
Wayfinding is the traditional navigation methods used by indigenous peoples of Polynesia. In more modern times, wayfinding has been used in the context of architecture to refer to the user experience of orientation and choosing a path within the built environment, and it also refers to the set of architectural and/or design elements that aid orientation.
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