Wayfinding Research

It might surprise you, but work to understand the complexities of the brain processes involved in wayfinding and navigation has been a fertile area of academic research for many decades. Its importance was recognised in the award of the 2014 The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, to three research scientists. Here we discuss how the principles underpinning the development of wayfinding strategies reflect how our brains work. Proving, if you needed it, that wayfinding design is part art – part science.

From The Longitudinal Prize launched in the early eighteenth century to try and solve nautical navigation; to space exploration in the mid 1900s that paved the way for GPS and Satnavs. It is bizarre, that the most advanced animals on Earth, have had to use our superior intellect to develop technology, to do what comes naturally to turtles and the Monarch butterfly.