The Problem
About two months ago my team got relocated to a new building. My desk is in a great spot, we have fun new neighbors, and the new building is pretty comparable to the old one, with one big exception.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to remember where the conference rooms are.

Contributing Factors
The floor plan seems to have been designed by military strategists intent on confusing hostile invaders. There is a central atrium with windows that are indistinguishable from outside windows, and the interior spaces are configured to restrict any view to a relatively small area. This means the office feels more intimate and light, but it also means that it is very difficult to orient oneself. Views in every direction look pretty much the same.

To illustrate, the first photo below is of a main hallway just off the main entrance, and the second is of the view just inside the employee-only door adjacent to the main entrance:

      
Can you tell that these views are looking in exactly opposite directions?

By the way, none of the doors you can see in those photos are conference rooms. Adding to the degree of difficulty, our conference rooms are named like a particularly challenging game of Memory. The theme for our floor is vegetables, so here are a few of our conference room names: Tomato, Avocado, Potato, Turnip, Parsnip, Asparagus, and Tomato Sauce. They are not laid out alphabetically, they are not grouped in any meaningful way, and the big rooms are not even named after big vegetables.

After two months and a lot of meetings, I still get Parsnip and Turnip confused (among others), and when someone says we have a meeting in Carrot, I have NO CHANCE of finding it if I don’t look at the map. Nor am I alone – wander the hallways on any day (like, say, if you’re lost) and you’ll likely hear someone say, “Wait, where am I?” or “Which one was Cucumber?” or “Can I follow you there?”

My Process
For kicks, I decided to see if I could come find a way to make this situation better. I spent some time studying the map of our floor, which you can see below with all of the conference rooms highlighted in yellow.I saw that they exist in much more predictable locations than I had realized. Every one lies either on the center atrium or along one of the four outside walls, which despite appearances from the inside are basically square. I then determined three main attributes that define a conference room–size, location in the building, and available equipment–and tried to come up with a new naming convention that would convey as much of that information as possible.

After a few iterations of names like ‘South 10 Teleconference,’ I realized that another key component is the ease of saying/typing the room name to another person. I re-focused on finding short, memorable names that somehow reference the rooms’ location in the building.

My Solution
Here is my proposal:I named the rooms with some reference to the compass direction of the outside wall, or to the word “center” for the rooms on the atrium. In addition, I thought we could use this compass reference to help people orient themselves and build their own mental map of the interior. Perhaps we could hang signs from the ceiling:

Or we could try something more subtle:

I’m pretty sure these changes would drastically reduce the number of times I feel lost, and the few coworkers I’ve shared this with were excited enough that they asked me to take it to our facilities manager. But I wanted to share it with you and more of my coworkers to get some feedback first. So please let me know if you have any ideas, questions, or comments!

How many of those cards in your wallet are loyalty cards? You know, the ones that give you special coupons at a specific store, or when they’re punched ten times get you a freebie. Probably quite a few, right? Most of us have one or two credit cards, a bank card, an ID, and the REST of those cards bulking up your wallet are loyalty cards of some kind.

I recently spotted a great hack in practice at a local coffee-house (the Cow’s End in Venice) that gets around that problem. The customers simply stash their loyalty cards (the punch-for-a-freebie kind) in different nooks and crannies all around the shop. This obviously requires the proprietors’ consent, and each customer is responsible for remembering where they put their card, but it usually results in a great experience.

Picking a special place to stash my card, remembering that spot, and finding it there when I need it gives me a special connection with the physical space and builds my trust in the business. All of those cards peeking out of corners is a visual manifestation of the large coffee-house community. I also appreciate the convenience of not having to worry about remembering to bring my card with me. I’ve seen people squeal with glee when they find their card after a year away.

This obviously only works for single-location stores with relatively small clientele. It wouldn’t work well for Walmart, or for Starbucks. But for a little coffee-house trying to use it’s local community loyalty to COMPETE with Starbucks, it seems perfect.

I see this place almost every day and am both amused by the poor setup and impressed by the lengths the owners of the dumpster have gone to in order to clarify who should have access to it.

The dumpster is accessed by this driveway, which is the driveway that belongs to the building on the right (behind the van). The dumpster, however belongs to the building on the left (past the sedan).

The fencing was supposed to keep the dumpter more secure, I think, and separate it from the cars in the parking lot in which it technically lives, but it only reinforces the impression that it is actually a part of the driveway.

This is some serious instructional/error messaging. I bet they wouldn’t need it if they were able to fix the underlying design issue.