A handrail that tells you what is in the next room

A museum with a difficult plan wanted better wayfinding without adding more signs. The proposal was to put the information in the handrail people already use.

The rail carries a low frequency texture that changes by wing. It is not language and it does not encode anything you have to learn. It simply feels different in different parts of the building, which is enough to tell you that you have crossed into somewhere else.

Most of the work was in the extrusion and the mounting. A rail is a structural part before it is an interface, and it had to pass the same load test as the one it replaced.

Visitors who were told nothing about it still reported the building was easier to navigate.