In the mid-1950s, when Jane Davis Doggett was completing her master’s degree at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, she was surrounded by students and professors devoted to arenas, shopping malls, medical centers, transit hubs, and other gigantic projects. was She was trying to define an era of post-war prosperity and urban renewal in America.
Mr. Doggett had other interests.
“The project was new, complex, and big,” she recalls. 2013 interview Featured on the Experiential Graphic Design Association website with designer Tracy Turner. “I thought about what the human scale should be like, coming into these behemoths, and how this person finds his way and takes advantage of the place.”
The field she started working in, which didn’t have a name at the time, is now called environmental graphic design. She became one of its founders, and she devised a system to help people navigate complex spaces, a specialty called “wayfinding.”
The airport was my vocation. In Miami, Houston, Baltimore, and dozens of other cities, Dogett has used color-coding, symbols, and uniform signage to navigate airport paths that would otherwise have been more intimidating for travelers. made it findable.
“I didn’t envision my role as shepherding people,” Doggett said. Yale Alumni Publications “Rather, I thought it was about clearly defining the path to get there and telling people the options presented to them for their individual choices.”
Doggett, a long-time award winner, died April 10 in hospice care in Sun City Center, Florida. she was 93 years old.
Her nephew Bob Lochte, who had cared for her for the past three years along with his wife Kate Lochte, confirmed her death.
A few years after completing her master’s degree in 1956, Doggett founded her own Connecticut-based firm, Architectural Graphics Associates, and is one of the few women to work in environmental design for decades. bottom.
In 1975, when the Hartford Courant asked her if she had ever encountered disability because of her gender, she had a simple answer. “It’s like asking Henry Kissinger, ‘Have you ever encountered an obstacle that works for de-escalation?'” she said.
Years later, when we talk Tampa Bay Timesshe elaborated on what it’s like to try to get a roomful of men to accept your ideas.
“If I could prove it, I could convince them,” she said. “It wasn’t easy to get accepted. Maybe it was me going to Yale. But I got in. And then I realized we were doing something important.” .
Jane Davis Doggett was born on November 4, 1929 in Morristown, Tennessee. Her father her Robert was an asphalt wholesaler who was a pavement contractor and also raised horses. Her mother, Annie Kate (Wiesner) Doggett, was a stay-at-home mom and, as Jane said, “a great piano player and a natural person.”
As a girl, she told the Tampa Bay Times, “All I wanted to do was ride horses and paint.” That included scribbling of her hymns when she was bored at church.
“My mother will have to buy a book,” she said.
She grew up in Nashville, graduated from Hillsboro High School, and received her bachelor’s degree from Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans in 1952. She then traveled around Europe for a year before she enrolled at Yale University.
In 1958, she took a rare opportunity for an American to visit Moscow to cover the 5th International Union of Architects Congress for Architectural Record Magazines.
The following year, Yale graduate Roy Harrower called me and invited me to join the team designing a new airport in Memphis. He commissioned her to handle the graphic elements.
The advent of jet aircraft changed air travel, requiring larger terminals and increasing the number of people moving through them. One of her key steps in the Memphis project, she said. 2019 PBS Documentary, “Jane Davis Doggett: A Wayfinder for the Jet Age,” was asking airlines to agree to a uniform sign. In the past, each airline was accustomed to sticking a specific logo wherever possible, creating a confusing hodgepodge.
“It was a big departure for them,” she said in the documentary. It’s from the airport,’ he said.”
This was her first of many airport projects. In the early 1970s, Houston faced a complex problem that would once again be encountered at metropolitan airports: multiple terminals. She gave each sign its own color.
And then she came up with another innovation. That is to post color-coded signs on the road leading to the airport. For example, drivers looking for Terminal A will see a large red “A” sign as they approach the airport. It’s common knowledge now, but it was new at the time.
“This is how traffic flows work,” she said in the documentary. “Before that, everyone hit the brakes to read. This was all done by this kid from Yale, and I didn’t know any better. I thought, well , this should work”
She often said her favorite airport assignment was designing the graphic elements for the airport in Tampa, Florida, which opened in 1971. Especially after navigating the tangle of roads leading to the terminal, you realize that no one in the airport knows which way to go, north, south, east or west.
“The engineers wanted the directions to be north and south,” Doggett told the Tampa Bay Times. “But I said at night, who knows what north and south are?
Instead, she used color. Follow the red signs to get here and the blue signs to get there.
Ms Doggett leaves no survivors anytime soon.
Doggett is also a graphic artist whose work has been exhibited in galleries such as Yale University and Florida. She explored using her shapes and colors to interpret Roman proverbs and Bible verses. Using a computer, she also created landscapes from graphic elements.
“It’s my own guide,” she once said.
