About Us
Carpman Wayfinding Consultants (CWC) has been making it easier for everyone to find their way around complex sites and facilities, since 1986. We work with owners, stakeholders, designers, and decision-makers in healthcare, cultural, educational, and other types of organizations where people are frequently turned around. When everyone can navigate with competence and confidence – and there are fewer lost customers, less staff time spent giving directions, and fewer DIY signs – your organization will see the benefits. First-time visitors, patients, staff, students, older adults, drivers, people with disabilities, directionally challenged people, and others will have a better customer experience and want to return.
CWC (formerly, Carpman Grant Associates – CGA) is led by Principal Jan Carpman, PhD. She frequently collaborates with research architect and accessibility expert Polly Welch and environmental graphic designer Richard Nicolson.
CWC sees wayfinding as much more than signs and plans wayfinding systems – coordinated operational and design components as well as wayfinding technology – to combat disorientation. Our approach is comprehensive and evidence-based, and carefully considers the realities and opportunities of the physical environment. We are sensitive to a wide range of organizational requirements, corporate cultures, and user needs. Our wayfinding analyses, planning, and designs have benefitted scores of organizations and hundreds of projects in 30 US states and 3 Canadian provinces. We help organizations like yours make navigation less stressful and proactively manage the inevitable changes that affect wayfinding systems over time.
We’re eager to hear about your wayfinding issues and discuss how we can help.
Janet R. Carpman, PhD | Principal
Janet R. Carpman, PhD is a nationally recognized wayfinding expert based in Boston, MA, passionate about creating places where everyone can easily find their way around. Her wayfinding work spans sites and facilities for health care, arts & culture, education, courts, public transit, and state government. Jan has worked with clients in 30 states and 3 Canadian provinces for more than 40 years to analyze wayfinding problems and find innovative solutions involving design, behavior, operations, and technology.
She is committed to understanding and meeting the wayfinding needs and preferences of all users, including first-timers, older adults, and people with disabilities. She also recognizes the budgetary, corporate identity, and mission-related wayfinding concerns of stakeholders and the day-to-day, job-related wayfinding requirements of staff. She is proud to have involved thousands of users, stakeholders, and staff in her research, planning, and design work.
Recent clients include the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa, FL, with AESUS Design, Tempe, AZ (2024-2025), and the Veterans Administration Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, CA, with AWEN and Minuteman Technology Services, Boston, MA (2022-2023). Jan contributed to “Laura’s Law,” which created regulations for wayfinding systems, lighting, and safety/security to improve the ease of exterior access to Emergency Departments in Massachusetts for patients in life-threatening situations (2020-2023).
She was the first Director of Wayfinding at the Institute for Human Centered Design in Boston (2018-2022). Before that, for more than 30 years, she was a principal in the wayfinding consulting firm, Carpman Grant Associates, Ann Arbor, MI. With her business partner, Myron Grant, and associate, Richard Nicolson, she analyzed, planned, and designed wayfinding systems for ~70 organizations. Their projects included wayfinding-related design reviews; environmental analyses; user analyses; website analyses; wayfinding master plans; staff wayfinding training programs; sign location plans and message schedules; sign designs; map designs, and room numbering systems.
Jan co-authored (with Myron Grant) two award-winning books, Design that Cares: Planning Health Facilities for Patients and Visitors (3rd edition), Jossey-Bass, 2016, and Directional Sense: How to Find Your Way Around, IHCD, 2012. She has conducted over 100 studies, published more than 45 articles, and given 50+ national and international conference presentations. She is a former Board member of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) and a former associate editor of the journal Environment & Behavior.Early in her career, Jan founded and directed the Patient & Visitor Participation Project at the University of Michigan Medical Center, Ann Arbor, during a $285 million replacement hospital program. The PVP Project combined research and advocacy to understand and accommodate the needs and preferences of patients and families. Wayfinding was one of those needs. Over six years, the PVP Project produced the first evidence-based body of information about the design-related needs of patients and families and had a measurable impact on the medical center’s planning and design.
Jan has also been involved for many years, onstage and offstage, with music and theatre performing arts nonprofits in Michigan and Massachusetts. She is a co-founder of PlayZoomers, Inc., a live, online theatre company.
She holds degrees from the University of Michigan (PhD, Architecture & Sociology), Harvard University (Master of City Planning), and the University of Rochester (BA, Sociology).
Polly Welch | Consultant
Polly Welch has been an advocate for inclusive, human-centered design – including wayfinding and accessibility – for 40 years as an architect, public administrator, professor of architecture, and consultant to public and private organizations. She has worked on several sizable wayfinding projects with Jan Carpman since 2021.
Polly was an invited member of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health Working Group, whose charge was to develop regulations for wayfinding signage, security, and lighting regarding patient access to Emergency Departments, in conjunction with “Laura’s Law.” She was also a consultant to Boston-based Minuteman Technologies, Inc., on a multi-year wayfinding master plan for the Veterans Administration Palo Alto (CA) Health Care System and is currently working with AESUS Design (Tempe, AZ) on wayfinding analyses and planning for the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa, FL.
From 2000 to 2019 Polly worked at the Massachusetts Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance (DCAMM), developing and implementing its Building Performance Evaluation program to provide feedback to the agency and its designers in the form of “Lessons Learned” policy guidelines, and design document review, especially in the area of wayfinding. Later, she initiated and managed the Statewide Accessibility Initiative, a comprehensive program to promote accessibility compliance and universal design in all state-owned buildings, including 6 new and 80 existing courthouses, correctional facilities, public health services, and higher education campuses.
She was a tenured Professor of Architecture at the University of Oregon, Eugene, where she taught courses in research, programming, and the social context of design; and developed techniques for integrating Universal Design into design teaching. Before moving to the West Coast, she was Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Public Housing Development for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where she oversaw the design and construction of thousands of units of community housing for families, older adults, and people with mental illness and physical disabilities. In 1984, she co-founded Welch + Epp Associates, a Boston firm that used participatory planning and user research to make the built environment responsive to users’ needs.
Polly authored Design for Access, an award-winning guidebook on making public buildings accessible. She served as the Governor's appointee on the Architectural Access Board, the state's adjudicatory body, and rewrote the state's access regulations to reflect its Fair Housing Law, the Fair Housing Amendments Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Her books include Strategies for Teaching Universal Design, Sustaining Urban Excellence (with Robert Shibley), and Independence through Interdependence (with Valerie Parker and John Zeisel).
Polly graduated from Bennington College (BA) and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Richard Nicolson | Environmental Graphic Designer
Nicolson Associates, Inc.
Richard Nicolson is Creative Director of Nicolson Associates, Inc. a ten-person environmental graphic design firm with a state-of-the-art fabrication facility in Pontiac, MI. He has 30+ years of experience in a range of facility types, including healthcare, educational, cultural, corporate, community, and sports stadiums. Richard is committed to aesthetically pleasing, well-conceived sign designs that are functional, efficient, and cost-effective. He has worked closely with Jan Carpman on sign and map design and other wayfinding projects for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Nicolson Associates in 2004, Richard was VP and Director of the Signage/Exhibit Group at Ford & Earl Associates, Troy, MI; Director of Environmental Graphics at Rossetti Architects, Detroit, MI; and signage designer for SmithGroup, Detroit, MI.
He holds a degree from the College of Creative Studies, Detroit, MI (BFA in Industrial Design).