Antonelli at Stanford
My thoughts on the Paola Antonelli talk at Stanford are posted on Core77.
Not included in that writeup is my rant about how ridiculous un-navigable Stanford campus is. I’ve been there dozens of times over the years but we still got lost trying to find the building we wanted (and their fancy Internet map website isn’t at all usable, giving you a tiny little window), relying on directions posted on the Stanford site (that proved to be inaccurate). There’s no signage or other wayfinding. Buildings are joined together in a way that makes it hard to see where the “next” building is; an entrance may or may not exist, with small letting on that door (which is 40 feet and up stairs from the pathway) indicating the name of the building and the building number.
We got lost even retracing our steps back to the car afterwards. The campus is poorly lit and every building looks the same; there’s no visual cues to figure out where you came from.
Like so many other things, it’s designed for the people that are already there. It’s not designed for newcomers or even regular occasional visitors such as myself.