Zoë Barrett, Wayfinding Director at DNCO, on her emotional connection to Gatwick Airport and how it sparked her love of wayfinding.
When most people excitedly book a holiday, they ultimately dream of their final destination; relaxing on sunny beaches, exploring cobbled streets lined with shops and cafes, enjoying late dinners in the warm evening sun. For me however, the fun starts the moment I arrive at the airport! I have always been fascinated with airports. They are spaces between places – non-places. The place between your home country and the endless possibility of air travel.
I can appreciate how they can be stressful places, often associated with heightened emotions, delayed flights, lost luggage, rushing through security, tense updates, and complicated transfers. They are also places where you reunite with missed loved ones after time apart — I dare anyone to watch the opening of Love Actually without feeling something.
However for me, I love everything about them and have been known to arrive early to happily spend time exploring, much to the annoyance of my friends and family. There are many airports that have left a lasting imprint on me. From my very first trip, flying from Cardiff to Edinburgh aged seven, to landing on a remote airstrip in the South African bush with a wooden hut open to the elements where we collected our bags from the side of the road – they were more concerned about elephants than x-ray machines!
The most beautiful airport I’ve seen would have to be Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners’ Stirling Prize-winning Terminal 4, Barajas Airport, Madrid. The image of its elegantly curving ceilings and colourful support system has stayed with me ever since I transferred through it when travelling for work years ago.
Gatwick airport, like all other major airports, is a sensory feast for travellers.”
In complete contrast, the airport I think of most is Gatwick – I know so many people hate it! It’s not beautiful by any means but I have an emotional connection to it. Gatwick, was for over a decade, the gateway between myself and my family in the Channel Islands. It was the place where my homesickness would start to subside and the excitement of travelling would start to kick in. I can’t count the number of times I travelled through there. Countless times my flight was delayed or worse cancelled — once we even flew all the way only to turn around because of fog!
So over the years I have had a lot of time to sit and observe the building’s transformation and more importantly how people are guided through it. In actual fact this was where, as a student, I really noticed the power of wayfinding.
Airports need to herd thousands of people each day as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Wayfinding at this scale should simply deliver information in a way that is easy to understand at a glance, often while running to a boarding gate.
Gatwick airport, like all other major airports, is a sensory feast for travellers. They need to digest a variety of information streams from food and shopping options, to health and safety information, and tannoy announcements, alongside the wayfinding. So the right choice of colour is important to ensure the wayfinding stands out in this busy environment. At Gatwick this is very clearly delivered using high level lightboxes with yellow-on-black for directional information to the many departure gates and black-on-yellow for directions to the toilets — one of the most important destinations in a public place. The use of colour in these pairings are considered amongst the highest contrasts, and so have become the standard in many airports.
Pictograms are another element that are strongly relied on within this type of environment. These are symbols that can be read in any language, enabling them to be understood universally without additional support. We all recognise that a suitcase will mean ‘Baggage Claim’ or an aeroplane taking off means ‘Departures’.
As a member of the public you need to buy into a wayfinding system the moment you arrive at a building, regardless of its purpose or scale. You also need to have an understanding of how you are progressing in your journey through the system, much like Hansel and Gretel and the breadcrumbs. You are given enough information to keep you moving along your path with reassurance that you will reach your goal at the end. Good wayfinding helps you to enjoy the journey and not just the destination, and nowhere is this more apt than at an airport.
I am by no means saying Gatwick is perfect but for me it’s the place that sparked my love for wayfinding and for that it will always be a special – if sometimes still stressful – place to me.
