The V&A East Storehouse Signs Read Like a Phone App

Visitors to the V&A East Storehouse in London are welcomed with a text that works like opening a new app for the first time. The signage was designed by Fieldwork Facility, a design studio in Hackney, east London, and its wayfinding (the system of signs and screens that helps people find their way) has been shortlisted for a Dezeen Award.

The building is the storage home of the Victoria and Albert Museum, known as the V&A. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the New York architecture practice, it opens the museum's storage vault to the public. Inside are 250,000 historic art, craft and design objects, most of which are usually kept out of sight.

Fieldwork's founder, Robin Howie, said the team studied popular apps used by Gen-Z, the generation born roughly between the late 1990s and early 2010s. The aim was to make the building feel easy to use the moment you walk in. The wayfinding was treated like an operating system, the software that runs a phone, and the team looked at the design of apps such as TikTok when shaping signs and the points where visitors interact with them.

Colour does much of the sorting. Yellow marks the viewing galleries, green marks the restoration labs that visitors can watch at work, and pink marks the Study Centre. Visitors can tell at a glance which area they are heading into.

The signs are also built to be changed. They use recycled paper tiles topped with recycled plastic letters, set into aluminium cases. Each tile carries a single letter, so staff can rearrange them and update the wording without replacing the whole sign.

Fieldwork Facility says it was started in 2010 and describes itself as a design studio for "uncharted territories," working across culture, climate, movement and place. The studio lists the V&A among its culture clients. It has been awarded by D&AD, Creative Review Annual, the ISTD and Design Week. Design Week also nominated Robin Howie, the studio's founder and creative director, as a Rising Star in British design.

For anyone planning a trip, the lesson is simple. The Storehouse is designed to be navigated by touch and colour, not by a paper map. For the people who cut, print and install those signs, it is also a project that can be rewritten by hand.