High school project idea · Design & Creative Arts
Redesign a confusing place so a first-time visitor can move through it with confidence.
Audit a real navigation experience and build a wayfinding system that works across signs, maps, landmarks, language, and accessibility needs.
Why this project matters
Audit a real navigation experience and build a wayfinding system that works across signs, maps, landmarks, language, and accessibility needs. This project feels different from a school assignment because the student serves first-time visitors to a school, park, event, clinic, or community space, creates something visible, tests it honestly, responds to feedback, and explains the decisions behind the final result.
What you will create
Use these deliverables as milestones for Stop People From Getting Lost. Adapt the details to your interests, available time, and real-world opportunities.
Research visitor goals, decision points, sight lines, naming, visual hierarchy, multilingual needs, mobility, color vision, and installation limits. Document the needs, constraints, credible sources, and perspectives of first-time visitors to a school, park, event, clinic, or community space.
Turn the evidence into a focused plan for the wayfinding system and navigation prototype, including success criteria, ethical boundaries, scope, and a realistic path to completion.
Create the first complete version of the wayfinding system and navigation prototype. Include a navigation audit, decision-point map, sign family, map, icon system, placement plan, accessible alternatives, and implementation guide.
ask unfamiliar users to complete realistic routes using the prototype and record wrong turns, hesitation, confidence, and feedback Record what happened, what failed, what users or reviewers said, and which changes you made.
Publish the final wayfinding system and navigation prototype with a portfolio-ready case study showing the challenge, evidence, process, revisions, results, limits, and next version.
Make the work stronger
For Stop People From Getting Lost, use these checkpoints to protect the quality of the work without turning the project into a performance for admissions.
Skills you can build
College application value
Can demonstrate initiative, curiosity, reflection, and growth through the student’s choices, response to setbacks, work with first-time visitors to a school, park, event, clinic, or community space, and development of Wayfinding, Spatial Research, and Accessibility.
The goal of Stop People From Getting Lost is not to manufacture an impressive activity. Do real work, keep evidence of the process, and reflect honestly on what changed.
Related college majors
Use Stop People From Getting Lost as a clue, then open a related major guide to compare coursework, career directions, reality checks, and other ways to test the field.
Stop People From Getting Lost is an original Compass educational starting point designed around real work, visible evidence, feedback, and reflection. It is not an admissions guarantee.