Read More Bihar Museum Wayfinding

Bihar Museum Wayfinding

WAYFINDING & SIGNAGE + ACTIVATION

Wayfinding through Bihar’s history.

A signage system that is visible when you need it. The overall strategy for the wayfinding and signage system was to complement the contemporary architecture of the Bihar Museum. This decision also allowed the various teams to work independently and parallelly on the project.

Why is navigation important in a museum?

Our main challenge was to encompass multi-stakeholder user experience, navigation, information hierarchy, content schedule, semiotic principles, and typography to create an effective wayfinding system.

The museum had two entries with different purposes, the main entrance and the other for children and visitors coming by bus, thus the signage system needed to guide them independently.

As a popular attraction for people of different cultures, backgrounds, and age groups, the signage system had to serve the sensibilities across symbols, colours using two primary languages - Hindi and English.

How do you design a signage system which is distinct but not distracting?

Wayfinding Strategy

The wayfinding scheme was designed after understanding the user flows and decision points of both the public areas and back of the house areas in great detail. The strategy is divided into three distinct zones - the Lobby, Children’s Museum and the Main Museum which houses the galleries.

Sign Family Design

The design of the sign family is kept simple with a signature fold unifying all the sign types. The signs are meant to be there when you need them but they let the museum architecture and artifacts take over the main user experience. The structural fold on the sign helps to visually make the sign lift off the wall, giving an impression of lightness. The wayfinding messaging is color-coded to differentiate between the museum galleries, lobby utilities, and the children’s sections.

The freestanding totem is the most engineered sign in the family as it rests on the ‘fold’ and rises in a slim profile, maintaining stability while staying faithful to the design intent.

Each sign orients the visitor with a simple message at the top, followed by a list of destinations grouped by direction. The messaging is bilingual and augmented with universally recognizable symbols to serve a diverse museum audience.

Iconography and Typography

Our selection of Ek Mukta Devanagri and Latin typefaces for the signage system was based on their high legibility and readability values, along with distinct qualities of being contemporary, humanist, and monolinear. The symbols used in the sign family were custom-designed to communicate with the diverse audience and align with the Ek Mukta font.

A Holistic Experience

Our wayfinding and signage design for Bihar Museum highlights how a brand’s ethos and personality are communicated beyond spatial context, materials, languages, symbols, and colors. The sign family represents a visual design system that bridges culture, user experience, and navigation with high attention to detail and strategic nuances. This system illustrates our ability to break down complex architectural spaces and create simplistic wayfinding systems to enable memorable user experiences.

Collaborated with: Mijksenaar, Netherlands

Team

Ajay Sharma
Parush Grover
Sarah Kaushik
Anshul Kapoor
Surajit Ranjan Das
Shruti Shyam
Shivani Prakash
Ashish Rehani
Mohan Godwal
Deekshit Danial Sebastian
Jonak Das
Sujatha Shankar Kumar
Anthony Lopez