Hi, I'm Tony Hawks, and I'm outside the Victoria and Albert Museum on busy Cromwell Road in the centre of London,

and I've found my way here by means that you need not know about but the point is I am here and I need to find my

way around and I'm with two people who are wayfinders.

This is a documentary from the BBC World Service.

I'm Tony Hawks and Wayfinding is what this in the studio is all about.

So I'm meeting two experts, Zoe Barrett and Patrick E. Lee from the design studio DNCO,

who know more than most people about how to get from A to B.

In fact, they know this huge building inside out.

We created the signage and wayfinding for the Victoria and Albert Museum.

So wayfinding is signs.

Yeah, in part it's signs.

There's a little bit of a mixture of everything in it actually.

There's thinking about signage and the hardware of signs themselves,

the things that you see on walls or hanging from

ceilings. There's a little bit of psychology in it about understanding how people get around

and navigate space. And there's a little bit of engineering as well because you need to think about how you're going to create a product.

And there's graphic design on top of that, which is about applying information to those signs.

So wayfinding is both the process of finding your way way but also we think about it as the material

that you use to find your way.

So we make sure that you have all the right signs in all the right places and sometimes we dial

that up so it's really loud and really brush because that's the type of place that we're in or like we are in the vene

it's a lot calmer and it's that gentle kind of persuasion to move through the building

...