Healthcare centers and hospitals have a myriad of programs within the facility. This makes the architectural planning of the hospitals very challenging. You can often find yourself disoriented and lost in a hospital. Most of the people in a hospital, a patient, or a visitor, are not familiar with the space and they are usually under a lot of stress. To add to this, hospitals are very chaotic, which makes it even harder to find your way around. Therefore, signage is very important in hospitals. For someone like me who is not familiar with medical terminology, even signage doesn’t always help because many of the terms used are often unknown. Along with this, the location of the signage is crucial. For a person with visual impairment, reading the signage itself can be tough. Thus, the color of signage background and the text plays an important role. Recently, digital signage is becoming increasingly popular.
As students of architecture, we have often discussed the importance of wayfinding. Kevin Lynch in his book “The Image of the City”, talks about how people create mental maps of their surroundings in an urban context. He also talks about the elements that contribute to the creation of mental maps – Paths, Edges, Districts, Nodes, and Landmarks. Some of these ideas can be used at a micro-scale, like within large buildings, that can make it easier for people to navigate through these spaces.
References:
http://www.schroeppel-design.de/0715_environmental/Mollerup.pdf
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/22565/Potter2017.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Comments