Living with dementia can adversely affect people's spatial (orientation and navigation) and reality (time, date and place) orientation, which can detrimentally impact on their sense of social inclusion and wellbeing. This is an important challenge to address within United Kingdom (UK) care homes where around 70 per cent of the residents are living with dementia or severe memory problems. Care home managers have some autonomy in decision-making that impacts on the daily functioning of residents and are key in enacting the orientation and navigation agenda within a care home environment. Yet a paucity of literature explores their understanding and experiences of this issue. Contributing to this knowledge gap, our exploratory study examined managers’ current practice of supporting residents with dementia to minimise disorientation and their knowledge of dementia-friendly design principles, guidelines and audit tools. Semi-structured telephone interviews with 12 UK care home managers were conducted. Questions started generally targeting residents’ orientation and navigation abilities, followed by specific questions to draw out strategies used to support residents. Thematic analysis identified three higher-order themes: aligning strategies with needs, intuitive learning and managing within the wider business context. The findings demonstrated that managers perceive dementia to impact on a person's spatial and reality orientation. Consequently, the strategies they chose to adopt were tailored towards alleviating both challenges. However, although managers were aware of some design principles, they frequently relied on intuitive learning and past experiences to inform their choice of interventions, reporting a lack of knowledge and/or time to seek out orientation-specific training and guidance, resulting in a low uptake of guidelines and audit tools in practice. This gap between theory and practice highlights a need for accessible guidelines that integrate strategies with neuropsychological theory, and appropriate training to improve orientation and navigation in care home environments. Managers, staff, business owners, architects and designers all play a key role in implementing orientation guidelines into practice and ensuring dementia-friendly care home environments for residents.

Contemporary halling, seen in theatrical dance works by the Norwegian choreogaphers Hallgrim Hansegaard and Sigurd Johan Heide, exists in a fluid interplay between traditional dance and influences from other cultures. This article examines how typical halling moves are negotiated and “remixed” through practices taking place inside and outside of the Nordic sphere. Hansegaard and Heide can be seen as representatives of “wayfinding artists,” influenced by migrant practices through moving, “wayfinding” in and out of the Nordic region.

This paper presents a taxonomy of human wayfinding behaviours. For the purposes of this paper, wayfinding is purposeful navigating in everyday life, in man-made environments, traversing an environment or aiming for an objective with which the individual is unfamiliar. The taxonomy is developed through a review of wayfinding literature from research and practice, user studies conducted specifically for this research and a process of thinking by designing. This taxonomy can also be applied to navigating in documents printed on paper and on-screen, but this paper concentrates on behaviours in environmental space. This taxonomy creates twelve categories of behaviour differentiated by the characteristics of the information that they use. The categories of behaviour are also separated into three groups: social, semantic and spatial. This paper briefly describes and gives examples of each of the categories of behaviour. This is followed by insights into the behaviours from user studies conducted by the author. (This paper borrows its title from Cohen, 2015).

Environments need to be designed such that they support successful orientation for older adults and those with dementia who often experience marked difficulties in their orientation abilities. To better understand how environments can compensate for decreasing orientation skills, voice should be given directly to those experiencing dementia to describe how they find their way and to understand their design preferences. This study explored the navigational experiences and design preferences of older adults with memory difficulties living in a retirement development. In-depth semi-structured interviews with 13 older adults experiencing memory difficulties were conducted. All participants were residents of one retirement development in the United Kingdom. Questions began broadly, for example, to describe their experiences of navigating in their living environment, before discussing any specific navigation difficulties in detail. Thematic analysis identified three main themes: highlighting environmental design that causes disorientation, strategies to overcome disorientation, and residents’ suggestions to improve the design. The design suggestions were particularly informative, heavily focusing on the importance of having memorable and meaningful spaces which were favoured more than signage as an orientation aid. The findings demonstrate the need to consider environmental design to support orientation for those with memory difficulties. Of particular importance is the use of meaningful and relevant landmarks as orientation aids which can additionally stimulate conversation and increase wellbeing. Given the range of suggestions in dementia-friendly design guidelines aimed to support orientation, it is crucial to speak directly to those living in different environments to learn how they find their way around and what design works in their environment.

This critical review addresses 26 studies of Wayfinding conducted in a real-world setting (large-scale), and with subjects using a map or an aerial photograph in their navigation. The purpose of the review is to summarise how previous surveys have been conducted and to provide some methodological advice for future research. Research design has consequently been the main priority, emphasising methods, measures, participants, context and types of map. Both qualitative and quantitative studies should be initiated, but the lack of research is significant within quantitative studies, the link between laboratory-based and real-world studies, studies where the subjects have been children with map experience and adult novices, and studies conducted in complex settings. Type of map appears to be an important determinant of performance and should be varied according to age and level of skills. Alignment of a map could be a possible source of error.

This study focuses on the everyday use of spatial frames of reference (FoR) and seeks to elucidate the underlying principles for guiding viewers from a signboard to a destination. Using Levinson's tripartite typology of FoR – absolute, relative, and intrinsic – and a VARBRUL analysis, it is shown that each FoR is differentially preferred depending on distinct geographic features of the route and the environment. Specifically, as geographic scale and route complexity increase, there emerges a general tendency away from intrinsic descriptions, through relative descriptions, to absolute descriptions, despite the general low usage of the absolute FoR in modern Japanese. It is argued that the asymmetries in the shift and maintenance of FoRs could be largely, if not wholly, accounted for by using such strategies as “single-perspective” and “absolute-reliance” and properties of “untranslatability.”I wish to thank Shoji Takano, Akiko Kato, and Hiroki Yoshioka for their invaluable comments on the earlier versions of the paper and their technical support on the VARBRUL analyses. My gratitude extends to Jane Hill and the two anonymous reviewers for giving me supportive comments and new insights, and to Hisashi Miura for his extensive assistance in the data collection and coding process. I also greatly benefited from interviews with senior employees at Sankoo Advertising Co., Cutting Kei, and Toyota Kookoku, and from various comments and inquiries from participants in the 11th Meeting of the Japanese Association of Sociolinguistic Sciences, the 37th SIG-SLUD Meeting of the Japanese Society of Artificial Intelligence, and the 28th Open Symposium: “Language” at Aichi University. The research for this article was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) (No. 12610566), 2000–2003 (Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Culture). All misconceptions and errors are of course my own.

This study compared the ability of clinical and ecologic simulation measures to predict performance on environment-specific criterion measures of wayfinding. Thirty-one unilateral stroke participants comprised the right and left hemisphere groups (16 patients with left sided and 15 patients with right sided strokes). Participants completed a battery of clinical tasks (e.g., traditional paper-and-pencil measures of visualization, mental rotation, visual memory and spatial orientation), ecologic simulations (e.g., slide route recall and visualization of a model town from differing perspectives) and environment specific criterion tasks (e.g., route recall and directional orientation). The groups were equivalent in age, sex, education, handedness, and weeks since stroke. Both ecologic simulation tasks were found to have fairly good internal consistency and 1 simulation task was significantly related to real world wayfinding. Of the clinical tasks, 1 visual memory test was correlated with a directional orientation criterion task, but none correlated with route navigation ability. Results are consistent with literature purporting the benefits of ecologic simulation tasks as predictors of real world functioning. (JINS, 2001, 7, 675–682.)