The International Institute for Information Design (IIID) has named two of our projects to be exemplars of “wayshowing”. Our wayfinding scheme for Lancaster city centre was shortlisted and our work with architects Levitt Bernstein for Eastbourne town centre’s Devonshire Quarter received a bronze award for work that helps people to navigate through unfamiliar environments. The IIID is an international body working to promote a better understanding of cultural and economic
We’ve all had our lives turned upside down by COVID-19. And while we still have a ways to go until we’re completely out of the woods, we’re all trying our best to move forward. Plenty of us have already – or soon will be – returning to work. As a result, we’re having to find our footing gradually and adapt to the new normal. For many of us, this next
As the weeks pass, we’re seeing a shift from ‘daily survival’ to ‘planning what a new normal might be’. As we look towards the gradual end of the lockdown, we can start to speculate what the future might look like and identify the lessons we’ll take away from the past few months. Here at Placemarque, this involves hypothesizing what behavioural changes we might see, how we’ll approach locations differently, and
At Placemarque, site visits are a massive part of what we do. We immerse ourselves in these locations as part of a process to understand how they work as places, we examine how people arrive, explore, experience, and navigate through an area. We talk to people and we watch how they interact with their environment. So, as you can imagine, given the current lockdown regulations, our working days have become
Image Source: Kera Till It’s been a couple of weeks now since everyone who could work remotely packed up their desks and made space in their homes. Whilst the work continues, it’s at a different pace, interspersed with home-schooling for some, video calls, DIY haircuts and purposeful exercise. In the calm and quiet of social distancing, here’s what we’ve noticed about how people are engaging with place. With only an
To varying degrees, we’re all familiar with a need for accessibility in physical spaces. Whether it’s lifts and ramps in a train station or braille room numbers outside doors. But these are only a very minor look into what true accessibility could – and should – look like. True accessibility is about designing spaces for anyone to navigate and experience. Finding solutions for visual, mobility, hearing, and cognitive impairments across
Most of us can remember the good old days where addresses were simple. Every street looked more or less the same. We had the comforting certainty of odd numbers on one side, even on the other. And our navigation instincts were only required when faced with the unfamiliarity of a cul-de-sac. But now, as roads expand vertically as opposed to horizontally, addresses aren’t so straightforward. We’ve been plunged into the
Placemarque recently conducted a wayfinding analysis for Royal Victoria Place, an indoor shopping centre in Tunbridge Wells. It’s a medium-sized mall of about 100 outlets plus a food court and its revamp is part of British Land’s refurbishment aiming to encourage more retailers as well as shoppers to the centre. Good wayfinding can be the difference between shoppers viewing a mall as an efficient, opportunistic and dry place to shop
One of the sessions at Built Environment Network’s Greater Manchester Development Conference explores inward investment: encouraging people to spend money in a location. This is a frequent objective for Placemarque when designing a wayfinding strategy. Good wayfinding encourages people to stay a little longer or walk a little further in order to spend their time and money in a different space, perhaps, in a different way. At the conference our
Connectivity means different things to different people. In July 2019, Placemarque director Sophie Campbell delivered a presentation about connectivity to a room of proptech professionals in Manchester. Whilst other presenters talked about bandwidth, BIM, subscription models and financing, we look at connectivity in terms of people and place. And only sometimes do we use tech. Disconnected communities cost the UK economy money because people spend money in their community. They
