Project Overview

Redefining the urban university user experience

RMIT’s New Academic Street is a physical manifestation of a new tertiary education user experience, and cements the university as a key part of Melbourne’s architectural fabric.

Positioned at the top of Melbourne’s Swanston Street, RMIT’s campus has helped to define how people move through the CBD. Büro North were engaged by Lyons Architecture and RMIT to design an intuitive, engaging, and iconic wayfinding experience for students in collaboration with the broader design team of Lend Lease, Minifie van Schaik Architects, NMBW, Harrison White, and Maddison Architects. Our designed solution embeds wayfinding information to create highly porous and navigable space, which opens up the heart of RMIT’s City Campus to the rest of the CBD.

Project Commissioner

Lyons Architecture

Project Creator

Büro North

Project Brief

The successful response to this project required an intuitive and integrated design response. Enabling people to move quickly and easily from street level and into the centre of the campus means less demand on RMIT’s contact staff, happier students, and a building which enables RMIT to create a seamless physical and digital user experience for its students.

Project  Innovation/Need

Büro North’s approach involved significant collaboration with key project stakeholders, including Lyons Architects and RMIT, to ensure the building itself would deliver effective wayfinding information. To do this, we took an holistic view towards information delivery, mapping out journeys through the environment for key user types. These journeys looked at the entire user experience, from website through to classroom, for key groups moving through the site. By taking a whole-of journey approach to how people move through the environment and process information, we were able to deliver a wayfinding system described where information would need to be positioned, and subsequently understand whether this information could be delivered through lighting, materials, colours, or built form.

This embedded information was then matched with clear and aesthetically responsive wayfinding signage, ensuring journeys through the building are clear, simple, and intuitive. Working closely with the broader design team, we developed a wayfinding system which combines the design aesthetic of the urban, public realm, and the information needs of RMIT. This meant adapting materials, forms, and scale to the context of each space, rather than applying a rigid design system to different environments.

Design Challenge

The New Academic Street building is both a large, multilevelled teaching space, and a key link between a major public transport corridor and the centre of the RMIT campus. It was therefore crucial to understanding how people would access the site, and how to divide a large, complex space into manageable elements.

Using a collaborative and iterative design process, Büro North developed a wayfinding strategy which articulates key entrances and associated corridors to draw people from the main Swanston Street link through to the centre of the campus, mirroring urban movement patterns and encouraging more natural and porous pedestrian movements. Working from these corridors, we were able to guide people to the right vertical transport mode and building within the site.

These steps mean the New Academic Street is not just a key part of RMIT—it embeds the building within the CBD fabric, and encourages a truly mixed use campus.

Sustainability

By working closely with the architectural design team, we were able to minimise the number of signs which needed to be installed within the space, instead using the environment itself to convey key navigational information. Less signage means less materials, infrastructure, handling, and, ultimately, reduces maintenance costs. Digital information provided within the space minimises the amount of printing RMIT engages in, and allows for adaptation of the wayfinding system to future needs, ensuring a longer lifespan for the wayfinding system.