The study began with an examination of the Heathrow ‘city’ through the ‘eyes’ of a group of visually impaired travellers as a lead user group. These user studies, undertaken in collaboration with London Regional Transport, Royal National Institute for the Blind and the University of the Third Age, established an alternative reading of the airport terminal as a ’sensory landscape’ in which landmark interventions using colour, form, texture, pattern, sound, structure and furniture could help travellers to intuitively negotiate the scale of the building.

A series of conceptual proposals for interior elements (landmarks, interventions, pathways etc) that are semi-autonomous to the terminal building were developed in order to aid more instinctive wayfinding. These concepts were plotted on three journeys (Arrivals, Departures and Transfer) as a technique to understand how the total ‘sensory landscape’ of elements might fit together. Some of the elements were then applied in a ‘live’ design scheme for Europier between Heathrow Terminals 1 and 2, a notorious wayfinding ‘hotspot’.

This thinking was carried through into the latter stages of the project which took two directions: one, a parallel study of wayfinding in other building types to identify good practice that might be recontextualised for the airport environment; and two, a series of conceptual design interventions at Heathrow to show how entrances, decision points and other orientation features might be designed to improve wayfinding for all in the future.