Designers: Takuya Wakizaki, MOTIVE Inc., Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Client: Totetsu Kogyo Co., Ltd., Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Totetsu Kogyo Co., Ltd., founded at the request of the former Ministry of Railways to maintain and reinforce Japan’s rail system, is a general construction company with far-reaching expertise in the field of rail-related construction.
We created a wayfinding system at the Totetsu Training Institute, which the company built to help preserve its legacy of unique expertise, enhance its technological prowess, and develop highly capable human resources.
For our design motif, we used rail lines—the core identity of Totetsu Kogyo, which continues to thrive in the rail sector. Due to the characteristics of the space, some of the rooms in the facility are in blind areas.
The rail-line design marks flow lines to those rooms, offering affordances for spatial movement. To capture the company’s personality with creative aesthetic accents, we also used rail scrap for the facility’s name sign and portions of the stairs.
The design for the second floor, meanwhile, uses the colors of the various train lines that Totetsu Kogyo services to color-code the rooms and the corresponding key cards.
On the key cards are lines representing small sections of track. Side by side, the cards can combine into myriad different route maps.
Through the design, we strove to create a space that would help trainees feel a sense of pride in their work.