Children’s Hospital Boston (CHB) is a 397-bed comprehensive center for pediatric health care. As one of the largest pediatric medical centers in the United States, CHB offers a complete range of health care services for children from birth through 21 years of age. Children’s Hospital Boston is also a teaching facility for Harvard Medical School. The Children’s Hospital Boston is a conglomeration of a half-dozen buildings ranging in age from 90 years to one year. As with many New England hospitals, CHB has added new wings and expanded its facility over time, which often causes confusing pathways for staff and patients to navigate in order to access hospital services. In 2003 CHB began an expansion and reorganization project at its multiple-building main campus – a project that will continue into 2008. CHB needed a signage system that would improve navigation, withstand the high-traffic hospital environment, and allow staff to easily update messaging and directional information to keep pace with short-term renovation projects as well as long-term staffing and department changes. CHB also wanted to brand the different hospital buildings and create logical pathways.

About the Solution

ASI partnered with Children’s Hospital Boston to fabricate and install the interior signage system for this complex 5-year, multi-phase, multi-location project. Two Twelve Associates of New York designed the signage system and provided wayfinding by assigning each building with a unique color and symbol. They chose ASI’s Infinity™ system for its perforated chassis and pin-registered face panels as well as its longterm durability. Infinity provided the perfect solution, incorporating the multiple color schemes with the changeable face components that allow the hospital to easily reassign department names as they renovate and relocate staff throughout the buildings.

Because of the vast array of services and departments housed at the hospital, nearly one hundred sign types were developed to meet the hospital’s diverse wayfinding and messaging needs. ASI furnished more than 15,000 signs for this project, which includes several suburban satellite hospitals acquired by CHB since the inception of the project. To help handle the large volume of data required to manage the project, ASI developed a system to allow the client to enter signs into a preformatted message schedule to ensure that the first sign produced would match in color and quality any of thousands of signs produced over the five-year span. The system also enabled ASI to easily meet the six-week lead times throughout the various phases of the project.

See more photos and download a PDF of this project by clicking here.

Check out this Blog Post on the Green Resource Guide about Children’s Hospital Boston Donor Recogintion Signage using 3form’s Ithemba material.

Ithemba features a copper and beaded pattern produced by HIV-impacted African women, giving them a source of income, and means “hope” in the Xosi language. The donor elements also incorporate tempered-glass panels that are updated annually and reinstalled.

We’ve talked a lot about how a good, effective wayfinding system does not equate to having an abundance of architectural signage — whether it be interior signage or exterior signage. More often than not, having too much signage can have the exact opposite effect: people become more disoriented, not less. People move on without registering any of the signage and either stumble upon their intended destination or, just as likely, simply give up.

A lack of signage, however, can be equally devastating. That’s what makes the science of wayfinding such a complex field of study, involving not only an understanding of spatial relations but also human psychology. Well-trained wayfinding designers know that in order for someone to go smoothly from Point A to Point B, they must not only know what signs to install but also where, how and, just as important, why. Wayfinding is a problem-solving process, after all, with a number of decision points along the route at which people need appropriate “information support systems” in order to make the right decision that will propel them to their intended target. If the environment lacks these crucial elements, people again experience disorientation, confusion and frustration. 

A friend of mine told me of one wayfinding catastrophe due to a lack of signage that she experienced when she lived in rural Japan in the mid-1990s. A Japanese colleague who had invited her to dinner with his family one evening helpfully gave her a detailed, hand-drawn map to his home, complete with landmarks written in English. My friend set off on her bicycle from her apartment a full hour before she was to meet her co-worker, just in case she got lost.

Which, of course, she promptly did. You see, with rare exceptions – mostly in larger cities such as Kyoto – Japan does not use street names and therefore have few street signs, either for cartographic purposes or even directional purposes. Instead, Japanese addresses usually indicate the names of blocks, districts, and building numbers; they may also include the names and numbers of wards and even towns. Thus, when giving directions in Japan, people ordinarily provide maps dotted with specific landmarks such as subway stations and cross streets.
In theory, my friend understood the fact that her colleague’s home would not be found the usual Western way, i.e., finding the right street, then counting down the house numbers until you get to your destination. In practice, however, the Japanese method of wayfinding so confused her that she had to stop and ask several people on the street to help her interpret the map. To make things worse, she’d only been in the country for a few days and neither spoke nor read Japanese, so hand signals and body language interpretation were definitely in order.

At last, a helpful farmer took pity on her and guided her around the warren of tiny streets for at least fifteen minutes. Fortunately, my friend remembered the type of car her co-worker drove, so when she saw it parked in front of a house in the middle of a quiet, nondescript street, she nearly cried in relief. It had taken her almost exactly an hour to find it. The irony: As she later realized once she got to know the neighborhood better, the house was actually just a ten-minute walk from her apartment.

Now, this may surprise folks who think of Japan as being at the forefront of the digital signage revolution. You only need look at a photograph of the dynamic, almost futuristic Shinjuku area of Tokyo to know that Japan is a country that certainly doesn’t lack the technology or experience to employ digital signage. Wayfinding, however, is apparently not its primary purpose, at least for them.
 
I’d love to hear from you guys about “wayfinding fails” in your own life. Feel free to share in the comments section below!

When people think of hospital wayfinding, they focus on the tangible aspects of our business: digital signage, modular signage, kiosks, directories, panels, and even the humble face plates. What’s less obvious, though, is the critical role that wayfinding and the designers behind all the displays and signage play in the overall healthcare experience for medical staff, patients and visitors.

The primary goal of the wayfinding expert is to create a logical, intuitive navigational system – using signage, lighting, architectural design, and even natural elements such as foliage – so that when people enter a facility, they will be able to make their way from Point A to Point B with minimal fuss or trouble. Hospitals are inherently stressful environments, and the inability to find a patient room, a doctor’s office, an exam room, or the emergency room can not only be a source of frustration and pain for a visitor and/or patient, it can also mean the difference between health and illness. Wayfinders thus must balance aesthetics and function as they design navigation systems that will allow people to make the right choices with each “decision point” they encounter on their routes.

Another challenge that hospitals present to wayfinding designers is the fact that hospitals usually serve multiple audiences: doctors and nurses with different specialties (cardiology, radiology, urology, physical therapy, etc.); auxiliary medical personnel with different job functions (technicians, technologists, medical assistants, phlebotomists, etc.); volunteers; visitors with different needs (family members, friends, jobseekers, delivery staff, etc.); administrative/technical staff (housekeeping, gift shop attendants, cooks, orderlies, chaplains); “other,” often temporary visitors and staff such as emergency response teams, researchers, and law enforcement officers; and of course, the patients themselves.

Each of these groups will have different needs. Even patients within a single department might have entirely different wayfinding needs from each other. A patient in the Gastroenterology (GI) department might simply be there for a regular checkup, but another might be there for an outpatient procedure such as a colonoscopy and will therefore need guidance on locating the right room. Yet another might need bloodwork in addition to a regular visit and will want to know how to get from the GI offices to the lab, which may be in a different building altogether. An especially large hospital campus will need a more sophisticated yet very simple wayfinding system that will accommodate all of these different needs.

The hospital exterior shouldn’t be neglected when designing an effective, efficient wayfinding system as well. Large metropolitan hospitals such as Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, or research hospitals such as St. Jude’s Hospital in Memphis, TN, or the University of Texas Southwestern right here in Dallas, all receive hundreds, if not thousands of out-of-town visitors and patients each year. The Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale alone serves 90,000 patients from all 50 states and a number of foreign countries. Each of these institutions must create wayfinding systems that will resonate with visitors and guests whose places of origin, cultural reference points, and even language skills may vary tremendously from one person to the next. In addition, even local audiences such as emergency response teams must be able to quickly find their destination – for them, good wayfinding can literally mean the difference between life and death.

Most experts in hospital design, including architects, designers, and wayfinding experts, thus now recognize that a facility’s layout and navigation system can be just as important – if not more so – as the color of patient rooms and the texture of lobby carpeting in creating a patient-focused, health-affirming environment. The tension between form and function continues to plague many involved in hospital design – who hasn’t heard of a designer and wayfinding consultant disagreeing over signage? – but as more evidence mounts regarding the impact of design on patient care, the future will likely see more collaboration between them in their joint efforts towards improved health outcomes.