Wayfinding can be described as the process of using spatial and environmental information to find our way in the built environment. Wayfinding can also be defined from the standpoint of the designer & client seeking to establish or improve the function of a particular environment: Wayfinding design is the process of organizing spatial and environmental information to help users find their way. Wayfinding should not be considered a separate or different activity from traditional "signage design", but rather a broader, more inclusive way of assessing all the environmental issues which affect our ability to find our way. Many of the new "wayfinding" principles have been practiced by designers for years, but have now been named, quantified, and wrapped into a more comprehensive methodology of the design process.

It should be noted that, although signage has been the most common solution to wayfinding problems, the new, broader view offered by a wayfinding design approach always yields a higher quality communications answer, because it often identifies the real sources of confusion in the subject environment, which might be operational, organizational, nomenclature, staff direction-giving, or the building itself.

History
Research at the beginning of this century by cognitive and behavioral psychologists helped to define such issues as memory, cognitive mapping, spatial recognition, and information processing, and began to shed light on how we use our senses to interpret the physical world, form a plan of action, and execute that plan to navigate to a desired destination.

Language of Space
Most designers, architects, and researchers recognize the work of Kevin Lynch in his book "Image of the City" (1960) as being pivotal in professional thinking about how we understand environments. He coined the term "way-finding" which we use today as well as terms describing spatial features. Lynch contended that all urban space could be described in terms of paths, edges, nodes, landmarks, and districts. It was this "language of space" which enabled later researchers to communicate with test subjects about what they saw, remembered, and used when they tried to find their way. It has become part of the vocabulary of planners, archtects, graphic designers, and clients.

In the 1970's researchers begain to study how we navigate complex spaces by staging tests of orientation and memory in large building complexes, building interiors and malls. These studies revealed that there were many different levels of ability in "wayfinding" and that the process was influenced by many environmental factors, such as building symmetry, user expectation, language, information from signs, other people, and old memories of being in the environment.

Reading
By the 1980's the work of Romedi Passini was recognized by the environmental graphics profession as being seminal in explaining many of the issues which graphic designers had been dealing with for many years. His research findings as published in "Wayfinding in Architecture" (1984) and a book by Passini and Paul Arthur called "Wayfinding - People, Signs, and Architecture" (1992) gave designers the structure for describing what the design of wayfinding systems entailed. (This book has recently been reprinted and can be found at www.paularthur-wayfinding.com ). In some cases the new work ratified the intuition of designers about good wayfinding design; in other cases it corrected faulty notions. Best of all, it has given designers and clients a common language by which to discuss wayfinding needs and solutions. Although many researchers have published works devoted to the topic, these are considered the most readable and applicable to design problems.