Formation

Nicklaus Children's Hospital Wayfinding System

Overview

Miami, Florida
213,000 ft² new construction
450,000 ft² renovation

Brief

Interior and exterior wayfinding system for a sprawling—and aging—hospital campus that reinforces the organization’s position as an internationally diverse and technologically advanced children’s hospital.

Services

Assessment, testing, design and documentation, contextual analysis, nomenclature design and development, vehicular wayfinding, parking structure graphics, pedestrian wayfinding, thematic architectural development

Site Analysis

  • Land-locked campus, no room to build outward
  • Single point of entry/exit caused bottlenecks and confusion
  • Several competing wayfinding systems were overlaid and in use simultaneously
  • Inconvenient parking experience; staff and visitor parking locations were inadequately differentiated
  • Out-of-sequence room numbering system
  • Staff gave inconsistent wayfinding instructions
  • Incorrect/inconsistent messaging between languages on multi-lingual signage
  • Repetitive, unnecessary, or dilapidated signs throughout campus

 

Case Study

Exterior Wayfinding
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fig. a
Walk times between parking locations and destinations were reduced, on average, by almost 2 minutes.

Due to inadequate signage and the campus’ single entrance/exit, we observed that most visitors ended up in the same parking garage and were unaware of other parking options. This led to unnecessarily long walk times to many destinations on campus.

We updated the campus parking system by re-purposing and renaming existing garages and instituting a system of color-coded icons.

In a comparison of user journeys before and after these changes were implemented, we saw a marked increase in patient satisfaction about parking availability and convenience. fig. a

fig. b
New exterior overhead directionals inform visitors of their location while guiding them to the appropriate destination.

fig. c
Pedestrian directionals integrate into their natural surroundings.

Interior Wayfinding

The new wayfinding system employs a visual vocabulary of colorful shapes placed strategically throughout the campus fig. d, transcending language to ensure utility for the hospital’s international patient-base while easily moving people through a dense landscape of interior and exterior spaces.

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fig. d
These shapes create a physical “interface” in the built environment that mirrors how the same shapes can be deployed across digital platforms such as mobile applications, digital signage, and software.

fig. e
Wall plaques adjacent to elevator bays pick up the icon system, letting visitors know where they are in relation to other paths.

Project Credits

PROJECT PARTNERS

PHOTOGRAPHY

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