Applied Wayfinding

"We make intelligent sense of complex environments."

Applied have created a multitude of different wayfinding designs around the world thanks to their Legible Cities projects. Legible London, the most comprehensive urban wayfinding project of its kind, I Walk New York, a major pedestrian strategy, and extensive work in the City of Vancouver to help make it one of North America's greenest cities.
Tim Fendley founded Applied to push the boundaries of information design. Driven by the need to make cities more understandable, Fendley has led projects in London, Glasgow, Dublin, Vancouver and New York. He has had a long-term fixation with making sense of the world's great cities. He is passionate about innovation and advancement, constantly looking at new ways to communicate and improve things.

Here are a few examples of their projects:

Dongdaemun Design Plaza

The Dongdaemun Design Plaza is a major cultural centre and an urban developmental landmark in Seoul, South Korea, designed by Zaha Hadid and Samoo. The landmark is the centerpiece of South Korea's fashion hub and popular tourist destination, Dongdaemun. The Design Plaza replaced Dongdaemun Stadium, with much discussion in the media, since the year 2000, for it to be turned into a public park and the city of Seoul established a plan for changing the function of Dongdaemun Stadium in 2005.
In February 2007, the city invited architects to participate in a design competition to create a high-quality design for the new landmark of Seoul. As the guidelines, the city requested the architects to include a design plaza, underground spaces, and a history and culture park for the project. Zaha Hadid's Metonymic Landscape won the competition and construction began in 2009 and it was inaugurated on March 21st 2014.
The 900,00 square-foot, free-form building is entirely curviliear and has no columns inside. The vast space has only a handful of windows and its walls, from ground to ceiling, are all matte white. These unique architectural elements presented a limitation to visitor orientation and thus an enormus wayfinding challenge for the Design Plaza.

Since it's opening, the DDP now hosts 8,5 million visitors a year, much exceeding the original goal of 5,5 million visitors. A wide variety of events has been held at the DDP, including various exhibitions, from traditional art exhibitions, contemporary design exhibitions to contemporary cultural events like Seoul Fashion Week.
Applied Wayfinding won the prestigious SEGD (Society for Experiential Grapgic Design) Merit Award in 2015 for the wayfinding work on DDP, calling it an "exquisite wayfinding system for an almost mind-bogglingly complex space."

Leer Madrid

Applied began work in October 2017 on Leer Madrid (Legible Madrid), a pedestrian wayfinding master plan for the city. Applied has teamed with local partners Paisaje Transversal (urban strategy), Avanti Avanti Design (accessibility specialists), Urban Networks and Paralelo 39 (urban designers and architects) to deliver the project.

The first phases included the team carrying out site visits and audits to assess legibility, and to evaluate existing signage and provision of information. The team also conducted user surveys to extract quantitative data, as well as mental maps drawn residents and visitors of Madrid to determine how they perceive and move about the city.
Findings revealed that 32% of visitors and 23% of residents had been lost in the week prior to the survey, almost half of users rely on tools to support their journeys, visitors tend to stick to the centre instead of exploring sites in the periphery, and none of the respondents used the existing signage.

User research also uncovered an aging population and a great need to provide accessible information to users with disabilities. So providing accessible information to all users, no matter the background, age, ethnicity or ability was one of the primary goals for the wayfinding system in Madrid.

Heathrow

Heathrow is one of the most complex environments to work with, as it is used by millions of passengers on a daily basis, combining a plethora of nationalities and different cultural backgrounds. The majority of these people have one thing in common, when they use the airport they are focused on the time-short processes of their journey and are often under stress at various stages of their route.

Wayfinding and effective mapping is absolutely paramount in any airport environment. Historically, Heathrow's maps lacked consistency, legibility and accessibility and were out of date and inaccurate. Applied were tasked with solving this problem, creating a coherent design and ultimately alleviating the avoidable stress of passengers finding their way quickly and simply.

Applied delivered a 'Living Map' system, which maps the whole airport with a geo-graphic accuracy and yet capturing the building routes and character. The centralised geo-databse that drives all these maps is now managed coherently and up to date, alleviating not only some passengers' headaches.