Wayfinding Design for Exits and Boundaries
How to handle the edges of a care home: which doors should be visually prominent and which should recede, how to sign a walking loop that returns to where it started, and where the legal limits around restricting movement sit.
The word 'wandering' is increasingly seen as inadequate, and the DSDC and Alzheimer's Society both advocate dropping it: much of what gets called wandering is walking with a destination the person cannot name or cannot find. That reframing has a design consequence, which is the subject of this article. If someone is walking because they are looking for something, then the answer lies in whether the building identifies the things they might be looking for -- and in which of its doors it makes prominent.
Which Door Is the Most Identifiable?#
In a great many care homes, the single most identifiable door in the building is the front door. It is wider, it is glazed, it has daylight behind it and it is the only door anyone has bothered to make distinct. Every other door -- the lounge, the dining room, the toilet, the bedroom -- is the same colour, the same size and unsigned. That is a design fact rather than a claim about anyone's condition, and it is worth walking your own corridor to check: stand where a resident stands and ask which door you would head for if you could not read the small print.
How to make the right doors the prominent ones:
- Ensure every toilet is clearly signed with large, high-contrast imagery visible from the corridor
- Install directional signs at every junction pointing to the most commonly sought destinations
- Disguise exit doors by painting them the same colour as the surrounding wall, while clearly signing safe destinations
- Create walking loops within the building that pass through interesting spaces and return to a starting point
- Provide meaningful destinations: a cafe area, a garden, an activity corner, a rummage station
- Use distraction and diversion techniques at exit points, such as a display of familiar objects or a window with an engaging view
- Ensure bedrooms are easily identifiable with personalised signs and personal landmarks
The sign this guide is about
Oak door sign — Exit
The square sign that names a room, with its picture. It goes on the door itself.
228 x 228 mm1A DSDC accreditedMade to order by Wayfinders
Already know what each sign should say? Send us the list on the order form.
Disguising Exits Without Creating Barriers#
The established approach is to let exit doors recede visually and make safe destinations prominent. Painting an exit door the same colour as the surrounding wall means it no longer reads as a distinct destination. At the same time, the doors you want used -- lounge, dining room, garden -- should be in contrasting colours and clearly signed. Nothing here restricts anybody: every door still opens, and the fire exit signage required by law stays exactly as it is. What changes is which door is the easiest one to notice.
Pro Tip
Give the approach to an exit something of its own: a memory table with familiar objects, a fish tank, a window seat looking onto the garden. Combine it with directional signage pointing back towards the communal rooms, so that the end of the corridor offers an alternative rather than just a door.
Creating Purposeful Walking Routes#
Many residents simply want to walk. A designed walking route inside the building gives somewhere to do it: a loop that passes different outlooks, goes through the communal areas, passes a few landmark objects and returns to where it started. The design requirement is that it is a loop, so that no leg of it ends in a dead end, and that it is signed in the direction of travel at every junction it crosses.
Recommended Products
Clear, consistent signage is what makes the destinations in a building identifiable at all. Our DSDC 1A-accredited door signs, directional signs and projecting signs are designed to be specified as one family, so that the lounge, the dining room, the garden and the toilet are all as easy to notice as the front door.
Legal note
the Mental Capacity Act 2005 and the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) set strict parameters around restricting a person's freedom of movement, and nothing in this article is a substitute for taking advice on them. Signage and door colour are not restraints -- they change what is easy to notice, not what is possible -- but any measure that restricts movement is a separate decision with its own legal process.
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Free printable door signs for your care home
Twelve dementia-friendly door signs — toilet, bathroom, bedroom, dining room, lounge, kitchen, stairs, exit. Print them on A4 this afternoon and put them up.
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