DESKTOP text — Olivia S Verdugo Graphic Design + Art Direction

Media Lab elevator signage

Wayfinding, environmental

Wayfinding is often treated as a purely functional problem. This project begins there and goes further. The updated floor signage installed outside the elevators at the MIT Media Lab serves the expected purpose, orienting visitors to the research groups on each floor, while treating each numeral as an opportunity to reflect something of the Lab's unique, unorthodox, and playful character.

The six treatments share a visual language that holds them together as a coherent system, while allowing each to differ from the others in tone and approach. Some floors are direct; some are oblique; some reach back into MIT's rich design history for their reference point. Together they function less like conventional wayfinding and more like a small typographic exhibition, rewarding the curious visitor who pauses to look.

+ Art Direction and design: Olivia Verdugo
+ Vinyl Installation: Highland Services New England

The ground floor reflects the Pentagram-designed identity at its most direct — a welcoming gesture that orients visitors while honoring the system from which everything else departs.

On floor two, the numeral “2” appears fractured into cubes, suggesting movement and synthesis, and nodding to the Lab's grid-centered visual identity. It may be viewed as either scatter or convergence: a large idea being broken down into smaller details for close inspection, or its inverse, many disparate parts coming together to form a whole. This mirrors the fusing of different ideas and areas of research that makes the Lab so special.

Floor three plays with the floors themselves: "2" sinks below and "4" rises above, as if the building's own numbering system is in motion.

A visual riff on a historically significant poster by Dietmar Winkler for the MIT Black Student Union — a nod to the richness of MIT's design heritage

The fifth floor was likewise inspired by another poster by MIT designer Jacqueline Casey, for an art show at the Hayden Art Gallery. This felt both visually interesting due to the inventive use of negative space, and historically connected to the Lab. The Hayden Gallery opened in 1950, and was the first contemporary visual arts center on MIT’s campus. In 1985, the gallery was formally renamed and established as the List Visual Arts Center, sharing a home in the Wiesner Building (E15) with the MIT Media Lab.

Scale and legibility pushed to their limits: a gigantic "6" simultaneously sinks below and rises above the floor plane, defying the expectation of what a number on a wall is supposed to do.

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