Team member: Chad Camara, Vidya Palaniswamy, Joe Willkerson, Yuebo Wang.
Cultural Wayfinding was the result of a semester-long project from the course Meaning and Form taught by professor Eli Blevis. The topic was wayfinding and citizenship in the Bloomington downtown entertainment and arts district (BEAD) and other areas of Bloomington including the campus.
We started off from a small project of digital documentary photography, which was to signscape Bloomington, both digital and non-digital, including downtown area and on campus. By doing this, we were trying to get an overall sense of the signage in Bloomington.
As a stakeholder of this project, the guest speaker from BEAD revealed some important information about Downtown Bloomington area, as well as the Bloomington as a whole city. From the talk, we as a team learned that there is an important role the art plays in the community. As she said, Bloomington is an art town. There are a lot of resources and a large variety of cultural elements in Bloomington. For instance, there are 100 restaurants in town representing the food culture from over 20 countries. However, there is a break in the artistic communication between the town and the university.
Also we had an interview with the director of the International Center at Indiana University. She pointed out a problem that students tend to gather together with their own cultural groups. Although there are events, like multicultural festivals, that tried to gather everyone, after the events, there are few further contacts built among different cultural groups.
We as a team examined the meaning of "citizenship". Our group discussion covered a range of topics from participation in government - local, national, doing "your" part in the community, to awareness of the world and where one fits in it, awareness of cultural diversity. In a larger sense, we are all global citizens. A good representation of this exists within the university. Bloomington residents as well as many students may not fully understand the cultural wealth of the university.
Also we examined the meaning of "wayfinding". We grouped wayfinding into two levels. One is the externalized wayfinding, which is "getting form physical location A to ophysical location B". The other one is internalized wayfinding, which could be interpreted as "a state of mind" or "a level of understanding". In this case we meant the "level of cultural awareness". The higher "level of cultural awareness" one has, the more of a global citizenship he has.
As one of our design directions, we wanted to design a wayfinding system that helps people "move" from a lower level wayfinding to a higher level one.
Based on the primary and secondary research and our group discussions, we started brainstorming and sketching. We generated many concepts around our theme -- cultural wayfinding.
