No Silos, No Surprises

People-focused services only work when they work together

Everyone talks about integration. But on projects, we still see silos. Architecture gets a head start. Engineering solves for systems. Wayfinding is brought in too late. Accessibility is seen as compliance only. UX and service design? Optional extras, if you’re lucky.

Then we all act surprised when the place doesn’t work.

People-focused services—like wayfinding, service design, inclusive design, user experience design—aren’t add-ons. They’re what make a space understandable, navigable, and usable. They don’t sit at the edge of a project. They are the project. Or at least, they should be.

Take airports. Most of us know what a bad terminal feels like. Confusing signage. Misleading layouts. Long, disconnected walks. These aren’t wayfinding failures—they’re system failures. If spatial design doesn’t reflect movement patterns, if digital UX doesn’t match the physical experience, or if accessibility is bolted on after the fact, you end up with chaos.

At Brussels Airport, we tackled it differently. Wayfinding wasn’t layered on at the end. It was developed as an integral part of the architecture, the service flows, and the operational requirements. The result? A space that made sense. From check-in to gate, without friction. Because the experience was built as one system, not as a silo.

Hospitals make this even more critical. We’ve seen service designs that look brilliant on paper—but completely unravel in practice. Patients criss-cross the site. Visitors wait in the wrong place. Staff waste time pointing the way. It’s what happens when people-focused systems are seen as extras instead of foundations.

At Amphia Hospital in the Netherlands, we did the opposite. We looked at wayfinding, environmental psychology, and inclusive design together, from the start. That meant the system was shaped to support how people move, think, and feel—especially in high-stress situations. And it showed. Not just in how the hospital looked, but in how easily people found their way.

Then there’s Optus Stadium in Perth. Architecturally striking. Operationally smooth. But the wayfinding? Disconnected. Why? Because the signage and pedestrian movement consultants never met. No collaboration. No shared plan. The result? Confusion, bottlenecks, and crowds scanning for signs that don’t match how people actually move. Not just a design failure—a coordination failure.

This is exactly why we built Humanics Collective the way we did. We bring wayfinding, UX, service design, inclusive design, and environmental psychology under one roof. Not just for efficiency, but because these disciplines depend on each other.

Behaviour is shaped by space. Space is understood through movement. Movement is enabled by services. And services are made usable through design. And we don’t separate them, we orchestrate them.

That word matters. Orchestration means alignment. It means every element working in sync—each playing its part, with the user at the centre. That’s why we get involved early. Why we work across disciplines. Why we test and refine as a team.

Because people don’t experience a building in fragments. They experience it as a whole.

So if your services are delivered in silos, that’s exactly how they’ll feel—disjointed, unclear, and tiring. Not because of any one failure, but because of the gaps in between.

The fix? Start together. Stay together. And never treat people-focused services as a checkbox.

When the disciplines connect, the experience does too.

And that’s the point.