I attended a meeting today with Placemarque and various figures from around the City Centre.  We had a good discussion about issues of finding your way around the city centre as a tourist, other visitor, local person, student or otherwise.

We had some interesting discussion about creating themes around areas and classes of attractions and how a balance needs to be struck between too much information on signs and too little.

We had a walk around the City Centre and it was striking how, in the eyes of someone who doesn’t know the City, it can be so confusing.  Where, for example do you go from the station to get to the centre of town or to Tourist Information?  It’s not at all clear!

We talked a bit about how mobile devices might help to make life easier for visitors without cluttering the streets with signs.  Some Cities have 3D barcodes on signs so people with mobile devices that can scan them (increasingly common these days) can easily find out more if they need to.  The Placemarque people were also very impressed with the Mobile Oxford site that I showed them as a piece of work by a couple of my colleagues at work.