14 September 2019
To: Vincent Bordeau
From: Noguosadia Egharevba
On The Issue of Navigating The North Academic Center
Background: The North Academic Center is incredibly difficult for people, especially visitors or newcomers, to navigate. This difficulty comes from the lack of proper signs that can help people find their way to whichever room in the NAC they need to reach. The lack of functioning elevators and escalators also makes the problem worse and can even present safety hazards.
Purpose: The purpose of this memo is to highlight the various issues with the North Academic Center as well as show solutions to these problems that will make navigating it easier for everyone. This is important because the NAC is the largest and arguably most important buildings on campus and making navigating the building easier will allow people to reach different areas of the building faster as well as stopping people from getting lost in it.
Recommended Solutions: The first solution that would help the situation would be to repair the elevators and escalators in the building. This would allow people to get to where they need to be faster and would also allow people with disabilities to get around the building as well. Proper matinancning would also be important to ensure that neither the elevators nor the escalators stop in the middle of their use (which has happened to me personally on one occasion) since this can cause potential injury or, in the case of the elevator, trap people. Both of these scenarios would leave both new students and visitors with a bad impression of the school which is something that we would naturally want to avoid.
The second solution is to place a proper map of the building for every floor on each floor. There should be one in front of the elevators as well as one in front of the escalators. This map will be large enough to show each room by number clearly but if this cannot fit it can show where groups of rooms are (e.g., rooms 110-145). There should also be signs on the elevators showing what floors they go to as it can be difficult to know which lead to the rest of the NAC and which lead to other floors of the library, this can prevent people from hopping on the wrong elevator and getting lost.
Conclusion: With these improvements I believe that the NAC will become an easier, safer and more efficient place to navigate as well as become more accommodating to people with disabilities. This will also leave a better impression of the school in the minds of both visitors and transfers students alike.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication license.
