Co-designed signals. Designing an open wayfinding system

A wayfinding system is a structured system of signs that has the aim to inform and orientate users in specific areas. A site becomes accessible to users through such kind of systems. Wayfinding helps to communicate and make clear functions, paths and becomes a true interface between a place and the users. Signals can have a stronger role in terms of visual language in making evidence to a place’s identity. Enhancing it at the same time. Using Christian Norberg-Schulz words, a user is able to orientate him self in a site when the experience of that place is for him comprehensible. Usually a wayfinding system is designed as a closed and forced system, superimposed to a place’s surfaces or spaces. But there are places that need a specific design concept to be adaptable to users needs, that change over time. Or to be adaptable to the place’s needs, that change phisically over time. Through an experimental project has been possible to set up an open wayfinding system for a parkland particularly used by free-climbers. A climbing area is a site where people can exercice their passion in rock free climbing and spend time outdoor. The site called Falesi di Calusco d’Adda - in the neighbourhood of Milan – is known for have inspired the background view of Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece “Gioconda (Mona Lisa)”. The site is visited and used from enthusiastic free climbers, who use to personalize and naming climbing ways all around the site. This context inspired a design concept for an open system of signs and typography. The concept is based on a set of elements and rules to be downloaded through a web site to implement information and orientation around the site. The specific web site has the aim to make accesible all the useful instructions and downloadable documents. The system is based on a set of pictograms and a personalized stencil font (the Calusco Font), to be reproduced on wood or stone, depending on the users’ needs. The all visual design has been inspired by primitive signs and adapted to the need to reproduce it on different kind of surfaces using ecologic paint-spray. All the design has been conceived to be easy to use from everybody, with a low budget and by making just a restricted numbers of operations. In this way the outdoor site can be enhanced by the community of users, that is engaged and partecipate himself to the process. The designer is not anymore just the author of a closed visual system, but of an open user-oriented process and accept the possibility that the community uses the elements in a freely way. This responding to an actual trend of engaging communities in the design and in the application of a designed system. The aim of this paper is to present this experimental project, describing his design process and discuss some of the above mentioned topics.