What London Taught Us About Getting Lost

Twenty years ago, if you stood on a corner in the West End and wanted to walk somewhere, you had a choice of guides. Thirty-two of them. Central London carried thirty-two separate pedestrian sign systems, put up over decades by boroughs, estates and transport bodies, each with its own map, its own arrows and its own idea of north.

The result was predictable. People did not trust any of them, so they went underground instead. Transport for London later counted 109 journeys between neighbouring central London Tube stations that are quicker on foot. People were paying to travel slower, because the street had never told them how close things were.

Nobody designed that confusion. It accumulated. That is what happens when the look of a place is designed in silos.

The rule produces the look

The designers we now think of as the pioneers of wayfinding were not decorators. Each of them started with a human problem and a rule, and the rule produced the look.

Harry Beck, 1931. The Underground map was a tangle of real geography. Beck, an engineering draughtsman, threw the geography out and kept the connections: straight lines, forty-five degree angles, stations evenly spaced whether or not they were. Clarity beat accuracy, and the diagram he drew is still the one in your pocket.

Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, late 1950s to mid 1960s. Britain's roads were getting faster and its signs were not keeping up. They designed a typeface and a system of signs that could be read at speed, in rain, at night. Mixed-case lettering, because a word's shape is recognised faster than a row of capitals. The rule was reading distance. The look followed.

Otl Aicher, Munich 1972. An Olympic Games with visitors from every country and no shared language. Aicher built pictograms on a strict grid so that a swimmer, a runner or a toilet door would read the same to everyone. The rule was universality.

Massimo Vignelli, New York 1972. A subway map built as a system rather than a picture, because a system can be learned once and used everywhere. Systems over decoration.

Paul Mijksenaar, Schiphol from 1991. He gave the airport a colour code: yellow for the things you must do to fly, black for the things you might want on the way. Colour became instruction, and travellers stopped asking.

Underneath all of them sits Kevin Lynch, who in 1960 gave the subject its name. In The Image of the City he described the quality that matters, legibility: "the ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern." People find their way by what they can recognise. Paths, edges, districts, nodes and, above all, landmarks.

What London did with it

In 2006 a study for Transport for London by Applied Information Group set out to understand why walking in London felt harder than it should. Its findings became Legible London.

The science was unglamorous and exact. The maps are heads-up: they face the way you face, so you never have to rotate the city in your head. Circles show how far you can walk in five and fifteen minutes, so "too far" becomes a measured thing rather than a feeling. The same system appears everywhere, on the street, at the station and at the bus stop, so you learn it once. And information arrives in the order you need it: the area, then the street, then the door.

The prototype went into Bond Street in November 2007. Pedestrian journeys in the area became 16 per cent quicker. Of 2,600 people interviewed, 85 per cent found the system easy to use. The city rolled it out.

Then the world copied it. New York launched WalkNYC in 2013 on the same heads-up model, with the Legible London founder, Tim Fendley, advising. Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, Paris, Seattle and Madrid followed. A system designed for one city's pavements became the standard for how cities tell people where to walk.

Those signs are handsome, and that is not the point. They are handsome because every graphic on them is doing a job. Take one away and someone gets lost.

Legibility is a public promise

Here is the thesis of this series. In wayfinding, aesthetics and legibility are one decision.

A map that looks like the place it describes is easier to use than one that does not, because wayfinding is matching, not reading. Watch anyone arrive at a stadium for the first time. They look up at the building, down at the phone, up again. They are trying to match what they see to where they are. The faster that match, the faster they orient, the faster they get where they want to be.

When a map fails that test, the visitor makes up the difference. They become their own wayfinder, under time pressure, in a crowd, in a place they have never been. Complexity is a tax the visitor pays. It shows up as missed kick-offs, longer queues, staff playing human signpost, and a quiet loss of trust in the place itself.

That is why I call legibility a public promise. When a city, a stadium or an airport puts up a map, it is promising that the map can be trusted. The pioneers understood that the promise is kept or broken in the design.

Where PAM stands

PAM designs wayfinding the way those designers did. Research first. Beauty as the result.

We carry the discipline into the digital era: into stadiums, precincts, terminals and campuses, and onto the screen in a visitor's hand. The landmarks you can see are the landmarks on the map. The map faces the way you face. Information arrives when you need it, not all at once. And because a PAM SmartMap is alive with real-time data, the map remains in sync with the environment which unlocks unforgettable moments.

The look people notice in our work is the visible output of that science. It is not a layer on top.

Three questions to ask of any map

If you run a place, here are three questions worth asking of any wayfinding you are considering. Ours included.

1. Would a first-time visitor recognise your landmarks on it? If your most famous feature is a grey rectangle, the answer is no.
2. Can someone match the map to the view in under a second? Stand at your busiest entrance and try it.
3. Does it look like your place, or like every place? Your venue spent years becoming recognisable. Your map should not throw that away.

London learned that a city which tells you where to walk, clearly and once, gets more people walking. The same is true of every place people visit. It is why the most beautiful sign is usually the one you never noticed. It simply took you there.