Wayfinding: Design for Understanding

By Barbara J. Huelat, AAHID, ASID, IIDA

A Position Paper for The Center for Health Design's Environmental Standards Council, 2007

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Each visitor—whether he or she is a patient, family member, or healthcare provider—enters the medical facility with a personal reality; each has his or her own level of “knowing,” and different levels invoke different needs. Some visitors—a first-time visitor who has never been in a hospital or has never had a healthcare problem—may not realize how different and confusing a healthcare facility is compared to a shopping mall or airport (see Box One). For these people, the hospital may be more foreign than a distant country. The visitor lacks experience, and this can lead to great confusion.

Some visitors, aware of their ignorance, don’t want to know how to navigate. They want an escort to their destination. Other visitors, who lack appropriate knowledge, know they don’t know yet are too embarrassed to ask questions so they will try to navigate on their own. Still others enter the healthcare system knowing that they are ignorant but are unwilling to stay that way. They will be proactive and seek out information. They may read up on their illness, get a map, and plan intently for the visit. They actively seek to become a knowledgeable consumer of healthcare services. They want options and answers. These people want to deal with the hospital experience and the illness on a cognitive level.

However, while these various types of visitors each may take a different approach, they are all striving for the same goal: to navigate the complex, high-tech medical environment of a healthcare facility at a time when illness, stress, and fatigue have depleted their emotional, physical, and cognitive resources.

Often, the first challenge for visitors in achieving this goal—the successful navigation of the often-overwhelming medical environment—is simply being able to find their way around the facility. Unfortunately, most hospitals and medical centers are complex mazes of long and confusing corridor systems with bends, turns, and foreign-sounding signs. Nothing looks familiar, and visitors, often stressed with demands of an illness, can find coping with confusing corridors frustrating to say the least.

More than just a convenience, the basic ability for people to get from point A to point B—a process called wayfinding—with minimal anxiety and aggravation provides patients, visitors, and, ultimately, the healthcare facility with some significant benefits.