Westpac Workplace Wayfinding and Environmental Graphics

Coinciding with its 200th year, Westpac were refurbishing their headquarters and implementing an agile workplace model. To help facilitate this, our brief was to provide wayfinding that would aid navigation and provide intuitive cues for the new types of work-styles available to employees. Alongside this, placemaking features & graphics were also required to activate specialist floors whilst providing a narrative about the bank’s impact, both historically and today. As the workplace was an agile environment every space needed to support the entire organisation, meaning we needed to communicate stories that were broad in nature yet constantly change.

The solution was to create a series of abstracted graphics purposefully selected to support a range of diverse stories. For example, coffee beans could equally illustrate a local cafe’s small-business loan or the bank’s support of fair-trade initiatives. Across the new workplace, imagery was allocated to support function. In focus zones, graphics became quiet, tonal images but in active areas they were etched into screens or perforated into wall claddings. Lift lobbies featured dimensional level numbers, providing a unique placemaking experience to each floor. Wayfinding was also fully integrated to providing a highly legible, intuitive space to navigate.

Throughout the project, Westpac were committed to promoting Australian creativity. This extended to engaging local Indigenous artist Lucy Simpson and a community of weavers in Northern Australia to craft woven structures above ‘reflection pods’. Taking cues from the seedpods that inspired these pieces, we developed impactful feature-walls that activated lift lobbies and meeting spaces, providing a contrast to typical floor treatments. Much like the layered graphics from floors below, these pieces symbolized the creation of a new, nurturing workspace, woven together from the sum of its many parts.

Throughout the space, the super-graphic images were accompanied by at least 1 story panel – a small disc that interpreted the graphic’s backstory, bringing the meaning overtly back to the customer. Over time the intent is for these discs to be added to – creating an evolving system that allows the bank to record the impact it is having on its community - giving them a framework to tell their stories well into their next 200 years.