Exploring an Absent Presence: Wayfinding as an Embodied Sociocultural Experience

Wayfinding has often been seen as being about the quickest or shortest possible routebetween two points (Hölscher et al 2011; Tam2011 ; Haque et al 2006). Moreover, this process has very often been seen as acognitive one, with the experiential nature of wayfinding and with the embodied, emotionaland sociocultural aspects of this experience conspicuously absent. We argue thatwayfinding is rarely a purely cognitive process that involves an individual person, who isentirely instrumental in navigating a direct and precise route, but instead that this is aprocess almost always directed according to embodied and sociocultural needs. We propose areassessment of present wayfinding definitions and suggest an alternative understandingthat includes sociocultural elements, embodied individuals and experience through theirembodied senses, as crucial elements of the concept. Seeing wayfinding from this differentsociocultural ontological viewpoint, opens up new ways of understanding and planningwayfinding systems.