A museum that tells you where you are

Ashgrove is not one building. Since 1932 it has absorbed a former swimming baths, a lecture theatre, a loading yard and two purpose-built wings, and three of those junctions meet at half levels. A visitor who climbs one flight of stairs can arrive on a floor numbered two in one wing and three in another.

The signs used architectural floor numbers. The guidebook, the staff, the website and the audio guide all used curatorial wing names. Ask a warden where the whale is and you were told the Marine Hall; look up at the sign above their head and it said Level 2 West.

So the first deliverable was not a sign. It was a proposal that the museum stop publishing floor numbers to the public at all. We named eight zones after what is inside them, wrote the rules for how a zone gets named and renamed, and only then designed the signs: three tiers, with decision points at every junction, confirmations halfway along the long galleries, and thresholds at each zone entrance.

Naming zones after their contents has an obvious cost, and we argued about it for a month. Collections move. When the mineral gallery is eventually rehung as something else, the museum will have to replace eleven panels and reprint the map. We tested the alternative — a set of abstract zone letters that would never need changing — and it performed worse than the floor numbers it was meant to replace. People remember the whale. They do not remember Zone F.

The system was handed over as a specification the museum workshop can build from, with the typeface licensed to the museum rather than to us, and a half-day of training that has since been repeated for two intakes of new wardens.