Designing out navigation anxiety: a neuroaffirming, anticipatory approach to campus wayfinding in higher education

Abstract

Navigating an unfamiliar university campus places significant cognitive and emotional demands on students, and those demands fall hardest on people for whom the built environment is least legible (Lynch, 1960). For autistic students in particular, difficulty with new situations and unexpected change is a consistently reported source of stress during the transition into higher education (Van Hees, Moyson, & Roeyers, 2015), and campus spaces are frequently experienced as inaccessible or overwhelming (Madriaga, 2010; Mostafa, 2008). Rather than treating this anxiety as an individual deficit to be managed, this paper begins from a neuroaffirming premise: that exclusion is produced by environmental and informational barriers, not by students themselves (Milton, 2012).

This presentation reports on a multimodal wayfinding intervention developed over the past 18 months on the MA Autism programme at Sheffield Hallam University. The approach is deliberately anticipatory and universal: it assumes that any student may feel anxious about any aspect of arriving at and orienting within the campus. Students receive a navigation pack combining annotated photographs, step-by-step written directions, and first-person walkthrough videos. These route not only to teaching rooms from the railway station, car parks and help desks, but also to the everyday destinations that quietly shape comfort and belonging – toilets, water fountains, cash machines, shops and security points – alongside guidance on what to do if something goes wrong.

Consistent with the principles of Universal Design for Learning (CAST, 2018), the intervention was designed to benefit the whole student body rather than only those who are autistic or otherwise disabled. Feedback from students, staff and visitors reports increased confidence, reduced anxiety, and improved engagement and accessibility – factors closely associated with retention and a sense of belonging in higher education (Thomas, 2012). The paper argues that relatively simple, low-cost changes that prioritise clarity, predictability and information-rich design across physical and digital spaces offer a scalable, replicable model for building more equitable campuses, and it offers practical guidance for embedding such practice into everyday institutional provision.