Kranen is currently one of Malmö University’s faculty buildings, but it started its life as a shipyard. Therefore, it is a very large and maze like building that is quite hard to navigate.

Upon entering the building through the main door, you have to take the escalator up to the C level (third floor). When on the escalator, the first scene that appears before your eyes is the bow of a ship. Yes! There is a Ship on the C level.

During our initial research and interviews we found out that:

• Most students and teachers have problem finding their way around the building
• There are some hidden rooms that you cannot simply locate even if you are standing near them
• People usually go to the C level first and then navigate their way from there
• There are so many corridors with dead ends
• Some people go through years of school there without having ever gone to some of the levels or sections

We started to organize our findings.

Then we analyzed them.

We came up with a number of ideas and sketched out some scenarios.

We tried out some of them with some volunteers.

Amongst our ideas, was colour coding.

We also mocked up the colour coding and asked people to try it out and had interviews afterwards with them.

We colour coded the building sections and levels. As for the ship and the rooms in the ship, we decided to use patterns because we didn’t want to have any two colours that would be close to each other and would create confusion. Another reason why we chose to have patterns for the rooms on the ship rather than colours is that the rooms on the ship are for specific use and are not like the rooms in the rest of the building.