Linking Wayfinding and Wayfaring

This chapter, written from an urban design perspective, concerns the relation between daily life traveling and public space design. While travelers are sometimes set on traveling as fast as possible between point A and point B in smooth and unambiguous ways, at other times they may be inclined to engage in a wide range of social encounters and sensorial experiences while on the way. The concepts of wayfinding and wayfaring, respectively, embrace diverse considerations for public space design to ‘stage’ such diverse mobile situations. Wayfinding, as defined by Lynch in 1960, emphasizes the ‘geosemiotic’ cues afforded by the city's circulation system to let travelers know where to go and what they need to do. Wayfaring on the other hand, suggests that traveling is indeed “more than A to B” and that public space may be designed to facilitate a richness of lived lives on the move. The concept of wayfaring may be prolifically used to revive an interest in how mobile lives are lived, and how ways are found, during daily life transport, with embodiment, diverse experiences, and social encounters. With outset in the relatively new position of the ‘mobilities turn’ and the ‘situational mobilities’ framework the chapter addresses key concepts to approach how wayfinding and wayfaring are linked in ordinary mobile situations in public space. The diverse design considerations that begin to materialize in this conceptual linkage can be integrated within the emerging field of ‘mobilities design’, which combines the interventionist perspective of the architecture and design fields with social scientific mobilities research. Implications of this integrated perspective for research, design and policy making are diverse, yet they have the encouraging common characteristic that they point to interdisciplinary endeavors into designing future wayfinding in public space.