Recipes for Wayfinding in the Washington Metro, with Garrett Corcoran

Garrett Corcoran shows us how design can be a bridge between the past and the future. Taking on the challenge of extending wayfinding to digital screens for the Washington Metro, Garrett shares what it’s like working with historical design legacies and figuring out how to make screens feel as natural as those mid-century hexagon tiles.

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Show notes & links

• Garrett Corcoran & Order Design
• Wikipedia walk: Washington Metro, Harry Weese, Lance Wyman, WMATA Image Gallery
• Past Episodes: Washington Metro: Great Society Subway

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Expedition Works

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Episode Takeaways

1. Digital Wayfinding Evolution: The project aimed to modernize the wayfinding system for Washington Metro by incorporating real-time digital information that complements existing static signage.
2. Order’s Design Philosophy: Garrett Corcoran’s firm, Order, focuses on creating cohesive design systems rooted in identity, extending across mediums like branding, editorial, motion, and wayfinding.
3. Metro’s Historical Legacy: The project respected and built upon the iconic design elements of Washington Metro, including the architecture by Harry Weese and the graphic design system by Massimo Vignelli.
4. Success Defined by Independence: Order’s goal was to create a sustainable system that WMATA could manage and evolve independently, a hallmark of effective and empowering design.
5. Design Principles for Digital Screens: The digital wayfinding system employed a black background for better accessibility, energy efficiency, and visual harmony with Metro’s existing aesthetic.
6. Systematic Consistency: The design emphasized a modular structure adaptable to different environments while maintaining consistent elements like screen size and typography.
7. Addressing Station Similarity Challenges: To counter the uniformity of stations that might disorient first-time visitors, the screens prominently displayed station names and clear, hierarchically structured information.
8. User-Centered Design Process: Extensive research, including historical review, on-site visits, and user movement studies, informed the system’s development to meet riders’ real-time needs.
9. Balancing Innovation and Legacy: The project sought to honor the Metro’s historical design elements while evolving them to address modern requirements, like real-time updates and future interactive capabilities.
10. Extensibility for Future Use: The system was designed with flexibility to adapt to inevitable changes, such as potential advertising or interactive features, while maintaining its core functionality.

Guest Bio

Originally from Ohio and studying at the University of Cincinnati (DAAP), Garrett Corcoran is a graphic designer based in New York. Working as Design Director at Order, a Brooklyn based design office, his work is research driven, systematic, and practical. With an approach rooted in purpose, he believes design begins with understanding who it needs to serve, allowing for a strong but adaptable relationship between form and function.

“We think about them a little bit like a recipe book, where here are all these ingredients. Here are the best ways that you can combine them, or at least the ways that we think that you could start with.”

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Recipes for Wayfinding in the Washington Metro, with Garrett Corcoran

Episode Transcript

Intro quote

[00:00:00] Garrett Corcoran: This was digital wayfinding for an updated evolution of the wayfinding experience throughout the Washington Metro system. Building a new graphic language that could account for real time information, alerts and changing information that would ultimately support the static signage that we see throughout Metro.

Welcome

Journey With Purpose: Welcome to Journey with Purpose episode 31. I’m your host, Randy Plemel. Hey Garrett. When we say digital wayfinding, what do we mean?

Garrett Corcoran: Digital wayfinding is information on a screen that is helping you get to where you need to go. A lot of the times that’s used as a supporting element to static signage, so signs that are out in the environment. Digital Tools and digital screens and information can only show up where those screens are. So they’re a little bit more limited in that way. But they could be a really helpful supportive tool in that they change and can update for real time information. 

Digital wayfinding is the malleable tool in the wayfinding [00:01:00] experience.

Journey With Purpose: That was designer Garrett Corcoran. He is of the Brooklyn based Order. We’re going to speak to in a little bit, but buckle up since we’re going to talk about something you might use every day, when you get on or off the subway and that’s digital wayfinding. We’re going to go deeper into Washington metro’s new digital wayfinding tools. 

The last episode, Episode 30, we spoke with professors Zachary. Schrag about the origins of Washington DC, Metro rail. And here’s a snippet of professor Schrag describing architect, Harry Weese’s vision for the stations.

Zachary Schrag: if this is going to be a subway for the federal city. It should look great. the end product was a visually spectacular design of these 600 foot long arched vault stations He did not want to cover up the concrete with some kind of marble or paint or anything else. So this was a way for Weese to get multiple functions out of a single structure and to Reduce the clutter. This becomes very important in [00:02:00] Metro’s history that one of the challenges of the least design is it was minimalist. He did not want a lot of signage. He did not want a lot of clutter. He had seen that in London and didn’t like it.

Journey With Purpose: Washington Metro opened up in the bicentennial year of 1976, almost 50 years ago. And in those 50 odd years, our understanding of wayfinding, that’s helping people move about the system. And our digital tools have changed. They’ve evolved. Today, we’re going to talk about how we can insert new technology while being true to the original design guidelines that have worked so well. 

But first, if we haven’t met, I’m a former architect who owns a small, but mighty public sector focused design shop called Expedition Works. Expeditions or just journeys with purpose and we help organizations get to where they need to go. Okay, enough of that. Hey, Garrett. Welcome to the show. Tell us who you are, where we’re speaking to you from and what do you do?

Garrett Corcoran: Thanks for having me. I am Garrett Corcoran. I’m a graphic designer. Right now I’m in Salt Lake City, Utah [00:03:00] traveling, but I’m based in New York. And I work as design director for a design office in Brooklyn called Order.

Journey With Purpose: What is order? 

Garrett Corcoran: Order is a graphic design office. We specialize in usually identity design, but kind of everything that might encompass. So, brand systems editorial design, motion languages, posters animation, sort of everything under the sun wayfinding definitely included in that. we really use identity as our window into all of those different areas. So we think about everything really from the core idea that informs everything that the design needs to take on. 

Journey With Purpose: One of the projects that I was really inspired by you and your office’s work was the digital wayfinding at the Washington metropolitan area transit authority. It’s Metro, right? That’s what everyone calls it or what WMATA or I don’t even know what, like how people say that acro