Designing for Clarity, Confidence, and Human Instinct (with Jonathan Mugmon)

Meet the Waymakers

Jonathan Mugmon, Principal and Wayfinding Director at Populous, shares insights from his new book, The Science of Wayfinding, and decades of

Key takeaways

• Effective wayfinding is about confidence and safety, not just convenience.
• Designers must experience being lost to empathize with users.

Main topics

• Empathy in wayfinding design
• Human behavior in large-scale environments

Notable quotes

The best wayfinding programs often go unnoticed. The people who create them shouldn't.

Conclusion

Jonathan Mugmon underscores that great wayfinding is rooted in deep empathy,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:03) The best wayfinding and signage programs often go unnoticed. The people who create them shouldn't. Meet the Waymakers pulls back the curtain on the designers, fabricators, project managers, and industry leaders who shape our navigational experience. How they got here, what drives them, and what they think the field still needs to get right. Speaker 1 (0:27) Welcome to Meet the Waymakers. Today's featured waymaker is Jonathan Mugman. Jonathan is a principal and director at Populous, a world-leading architecture practice that specializes in designing stadiums and arenas around the world. Jonathan's first book, The Science of Wayfinding, Psychology, Strategy, and Navigation in Large-Scale Environments, has just published, and in fact, Jonathan is off to pick up a box full of books as soon as we're done recording. Welcome to Meet the Waymakers, Jonathan. Speaker 2 (0:55) Thank you for having me on the podcast. It's really exciting to be able to chat with you for a little while today and share some of the insights that went into the writing of the book and our practice here at Populous. Speaker 1 (1:06) We like to start all of our guests off with a standard warm-up question. Can you tell me about an experience you've had when you were hopelessly lost? Speaker 2 (1:13) Sure, James. One thing that's sort of funny that makes at least me as a wayfinding planner and designer think about this thoughtfully is that I find that I get lost quite a bit. And that probably makes me a more empathetic designer from the wayfinding perspective. But I remember about four years ago, I was with my wife and two kids in Yosemite National Park. And we had just finished a day of exploring via car. And we were getting towards the parking lot and just packed up all of our stuff and ready to go. We looked at our watches and thought, oh, we have a little extra time. So there was a sign adjacent to where we parked that said loop trail two miles this direction. So we had thought, okay, two miles, we can do that in probably 45 minutes or so. So we took the hike on the trail and left some of the things that we would normally have in the car, such as hats and extra water bottles and map. And it turned out that it wasn't a loop trail at all, that it was something that there was little signage. We couldn't find our way. I got uncertain, which leads to hesitation and anxiety and felt very vulnerable. Here I am with two kids. And then there was... literally nobody else that we could see for the majority of the trail and we were getting deeper into the woods. It turned out that, you know, while it was supposedly a loop trail, it just wasn't signed well. There was no recognizable landmarks. The naming wasn't positive just from the trailhead. It was, and we had no reassurance or confirmation that we were still on the right path. And luckily we ran into a couple of people who were familiar. with the path that our regulars and they pointed us in the right direction and we're able to find our way. But, you know, it really makes you think about getting lost when it teaches you that wayfinding is not necessarily always a convenience. It's an infrastructure for confidence and sometimes even safety for anxiety. So it's really important, the role that we do. And sometimes, you know, it takes for us to experience those moments of vulnerability in order to figure that out. Speaker 1 (3:08) Was a strongly worded email sent to the Parks Commission after that experience? Speaker 2 (3:14) No, I didn't follow up. It's probably harder to track down the right person who is responsible for that than to just take it as a good story and understand that, you know, we need to prepare before we head out to the trail and make sure we have our water bottles and a map with us. And there, you know, here was a case that you have no Wi-Fi. There was no cell service in the center of a national park. while I may have sat down and tried to bring up Google Maps, and there was just nothing to be found. So it worked out for the best, but it was, you know, something that puts you into the empathetic shoes of people we work for. Speaker 1 (3:46) Every time I hear these stories, I think of that Seinfeld episode, is anyone here a marine biologist? And yeah, when I get lost in various places, I think of yelling out, you know, is anyone here a wayfinding specialist? That proves that a wayfinding Speaker 2 (3:59) specialist might not be able to solve it. Speaker 1 (4:02) That's true. So let's learn a bit more. So how did you get started in your own career and who or what most influenced your approach early in your career? Sure. So I just graduated Speaker 2 (4:12) from grad school in North Carolina and had a friend of mine who was an undergrad who worked at an urban design firm by the name of Glodding Jackson. And I was planning on going back to teaching at the university. They had offered me a position at the... local university. And this was summertime and they had just won, this friend of mine had just won as part of a larger project, a street skate project for a small city. And it involved doing a wayfinding and branding plan. And she was going to handle the branding component, but needed help on the wayfinding side and thought that I could be helpful as I had an undergrad in graphic design and my graduate in environmental design. So this was a firm that had urban design, landscape architecture, transportation planning was their primary. business. And I ended up staying there with that same group of people for about 12 years. And over the course of that time, they were bought by bigger firms, but we were still with the same group. And that taught me how to think about paths and routes and destinations and districts, barriers to movement, and how to think about these places that people move and not just thinking about signs themselves, but how we can understand how people physically work and move through space. So that company was bought by multiple other companies. As I said, I was with the same group and it grew to a company that bought us by about 120,000 people. So I ended up trading and saying I need to go somewhere a little bit different where I feel I can add value and learn from that. So I moved to London and worked for a company called Applied Wayfinding, which has a great reputation of doing pedestrian wayfinding systems. Their real focus is on user-centered design and environmental legibility, a little bit of psychology of navigation. And we worked on projects like Legible London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Google's headquarters, and Lusail City, which was a brand new city that was being built in Qatar for the World Cup in 2022. And what I learned there was, you know, demonstrating that places themselves can be the navigation system and not just the signs themselves, how we have things called intuitive navigation. And I learned, you know, that... what people bring with them is just as important as what they find in those spaces, such as, you know, what behaviors, emotions, and the environment which influences the perception of these environments. So I was very lucky to sort of go beyond the education I found in school to be able to apply that understanding of how people. Now I'm with Populous. I've been here a decade now, and I manage and lead a group of about 25 people who do what we do here. across projects. And, you know, we're working on high volume environments where movement, operations, safety, and guest experience are all of primary importance. And we're always starting with people behavior to determine what communications is needed. Speaker 1 (6:58) I'd love to hear more about the clients and markets you serve at Populous and the scope and scale of those projects. Speaker 2 (7:04) Populous, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is a global design practice. While we're known for the architecture, we're... We call ourselves a design practice because we have multiple disciplines where a large number of people come together in the types of places we design, stadiums, arenas, convention centers, airports, major events of all types. And our team, the wayfinding team specifically, is involved with almost every project that Populous works upon. We have a U.S. practice, which I manage the wayfinding for. a London-based practice which manages Middle East and Europe, and then a practice in Brisbane that handles the APAC region. And each of those have leaders within the wayfinding practice. But my team spans the entire journey from how people get from the city to the sites that we have venues. And some of our projects include convention centers to sports such as NFL, NBA, Major League Soccer, hockey. baseball venues and some even venues that have a mixture of those, like Tottenham Hotspurs in London has a mixture of uses. They'll have an NFL game and they'll have a European Soccer League game. We work on the Olympics. We've worked on multiple Super Bowls, as well as projects that don't have the same sort of easy classification like MSG Sphere, where it's, you know, what is it type of thing. So these types of projects involve architecture, but more importantly for us, it's about... operations and crowd movement accessibility, branding, and technology integration. Talking about a project where you have 65,000 people moving through an unfamiliar environment, it's really what engages me is the challenge of making sure that each of those people feel safe and comfortable and are able to use