Chris Kueh said:
>>Comments I get from one architect was that this is an architectural approach and NOT a signage solution, while adviced me to stick to my own discipline.<<
I guess that particular architect's reply shows that s/he is neither a strategic thinker nor a candidate for interdisciplinary work. Architects can have blind spots - the facilities manager of a big new hospital recently complained to me that the architects had completely ignored the signage problem in the building, so there was nowhere you could mount a sign near a doorway or lift.
On the other hand a good architect will understand the wayfinding problem in rich and subtle ways. In another hospital project (Barts West Wing Breast Cancer Care Unit in London) the architects (Greenhill Jenner) have ensured that visitors to the unit will usually be able to see the hospital's central square as they move around the building, maintaining their basic orientation. At the next level they have ensured that the waiting rooms at the entrance to each floor each have a distinctive and non-standard character. A relative of mine was recently in a hospital where you could only tell her ward from all the others because it was less tidy (all the wards were untidy but this one was a dump so that was a real help with wayfinding :o)
The Barts project was informed by careful research - for example the group of artists working on it interviewed patients to discover their emotional experiences of the hospital. One key finding was that patients attending the cancer care unit wanted to be somewhere else because it was only in the unit that they were reminded that they had cancer. This led to a whole series of artworks that took people away from their immediate setting into different natural, imaginary and domestic environments. The collaboration between the architects, the artists and the various groups of hospital staff and patients was a great example of interdisciplinarity in action. You can see some images ot the West Wing project at http://www.bartsandthelondon.org.uk/newhospitals/advance_projects.asp
best wishes from Sheffield, where we have some really good examples of bad hospital design.
Chris
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Professor Chris Rust
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Sheffield Hallam University
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