Company Profile

Informing Design is not the typical design firm.

Its roots are in mathematics. Both its founding principal, Bob Firth, and its senior principal, Kathy Bagdonas, have backgrounds in math.

Currently, the firm’s biggest projects may well be the two largest design contracts of their kind ever awarded: a new statewide tourism sign system for Maryland and a new one for Nashville. It’s next biggest project is the remapping of Montreal, including the coherent articulation at road map scale of every last expressway ramp on the island.

So what do these projects for the design of traffic sign systems and the design of a road map have to do with mathematics? It all started with the fact that Pittsburgh’s road network makes for a fantastic geometrical puzzle, a puzzle which Bob Firth was determined to solve.

In 1990, Bob was naive enough to believe that there had to be a way to grasp complicated road networks, to understand them in real time, on the fly. He assembled his first attempts at making “coherent” maps in an atlas called “Pittsburgh Figured Out”, which promptly became the fastest-selling regional title in Pittsburgh history. Its success propelled Bob’s firm into a succession of transportation projects, including the design of the Pittsburgh Wayfinder Sign System and of the region’s transit system map. During this time, Bob developed his general solution to mapping complicated transportation networks, which he termed “Haptics Mapping”. It is based on the discovery that the corridor and area elements of such networks could be articulated as a single over-all ordering.

By the end of 1996, he was invited to present its principles to a specially-convened panel of the Transportation Research Board at the National Academy of Sciences. By 2005, he had developed sign guidelines for the state of Maryland based on these principles that could serve as a new national standard for tourism signing. Now in 2007, Informing Design is embarked on a wide range of projects ranging from novel forms of pedestrian signing to a new kind of geographical interface for mobile devices.