September 10th, 2026
A four-story academic building laid out in a figure eight, with nearly 50 doorways and no obvious logic to how they connect, is a hard building for anyone to learn quickly. For a community college where that building hosts the bulk of daily classes, the quirky architecture is a navigation problem that new students, transfer students, and campus visitors run into on day one, when they’re already anxious about finding a classroom on time.
That was the starting point for a recent wayfinding systems deployment by 22Miles at a Midwest community college’s main academic building. The Facilities team knew the layout was a persistent source of frustration, and they wanted a solution that would actually solve it, not just decorate the hallways with nicer-looking versions of the same static maps.
Wayfinding Systems Built Around the Actual Building, Not a Generic Template
The college worked with 22Miles and a longtime systems integrator partner to design a wayfinding system tailored to the building’s specific layout, rather than adapting an off-the-shelf directory template to fit. 22Miles specialists visited the campus in person to run an on-site demo and needs assessment before any design work started, which mattered given how unusual the figure-eight floor plan is to navigate on paper, let alone explain to a first-time visitor.
A generic directory template assumes an average building: a grid of hallways, numbered in a way that makes intuitive sense once you’ve seen it once. This college’s figure-eight layout with close to 50 doorways doesn’t offer that shortcut. Visitors can’t build a mental map from a glance the way they might in a simpler building, which is exactly why the on-site needs assessment mattered before any kiosk went up. They needed a wayfinding system designed against the actual floor plan, rather than a template stretched to fit it; that is the placement difference between a kiosk people glance at once and one they actually rely on.
The resulting deployment paired two different display types, each tailored to the area’s design. Three interactive kiosks now sit in the building’s highest-traffic areas, each offering a touchscreen directory and 3D maps that let anyone get step-by-step directions to wherever they’re headed. Alongside the kiosks, the college replaced 25 outdated bulletin boards with non-touch digital signage displays that dynamically show campus news, event schedules, and directional information, turning static message boards that used to go stale for weeks at a time into something the Facilities and Marketing teams can actually keep current.
The screens aren’t just a communications upgrade sitting next to the wayfinding, either. They’re integrated with the college’s Everbridge emergency alert system, so critical notifications reach every screen in the building instantly rather than depending on a separate manual process during an actual emergency.
Getting the People Side Right, Not Just the Screens
The Facilities department led the project, with the college’s Marketing team providing close support to keep content on-brand and on-message once the system went live. That division of labor matters more than it sounds: a wayfinding system that Facilities can install but Marketing can’t keep current tends to look outdated within a year, no matter how good the initial deployment is.
On the 22Miles side, project manager Hannah Shearer coordinated directly with the college’s stakeholders throughout the rollout, and the SI partner’s local implementation team handled installation and made sure the technology integrated cleanly with the building’s existing infrastructure. That combination, a dedicated 22Miles project manager plus an on-the-ground integrator, is the same full-service model behind most 22Miles wayfinding system deployments, not a one-off arrangement for this project specifically.
The rollout also followed a pattern that shows up constantly in higher ed technology adoption: real hesitation before launch, followed by real enthusiasm once staff actually used the system. Once the college’s team saw how easy the new kiosks and displays were to manage day to day, initial reluctance about learning another new system turned into genuine excitement about a better way to communicate across campus.
For other facilities and IT teams sizing up a similar project, the shape of this rollout is worth paying attention to as much as the results. It wasn’t a single big-bang installation across the whole campus. It started with the one building causing the most friction, proved out with real users, and only then became the basis for a campus-wide expansion plan. That’s a lower-risk way to find out whether a wayfinding system actually fits a campus’s needs before committing budget to every building at once.
What Comes Next: Expansion
The college isn’t stopping at one building. Having seen the results in the main academic building, plans are already underway to expand the wayfinding system campus-wide: a full 3D map and interior wayfinding for four additional buildings, along with more digital displays across the rest of campus. The same 22Miles project manager who ran the first rollout will guide the expansion, which keeps the institutional knowledge from the first deployment intact instead of starting the relationship over with someone new.
That expansion is straightforward partly because of how DX Pro™, 22Miles’ platform, is built. Adding four more buildings doesn’t mean standing up a second system or negotiating a second contract; it means extending the same dashboard the Facilities and Marketing teams already know how to use.
DX Pro runs cloud, on-premise, or hybrid, and scales from a handful of screens to hundreds without a different architecture underneath, so a campus-wide expansion is a matter of adding devices and maps to an existing deployment rather than re-platforming. That’s the same reason the emergency alert integration and content management workflow already in place in the first building will carry over to the next four without being rebuilt from scratch.
That expansion pattern is common for a reason. A wayfinding system that solves a real, specific problem in one building tends to make the case for itself once people who work and study there see it functioning day to day. Nobody has to be convinced twice that a confusing building is a real problem worth solving.
If your own campus has a building people struggle to navigate, whether it’s a figure-eight floor plan, a maze of additions built onto an older structure, or just too many doors that all look the same, it’s worth seeing what a purpose-built wayfinding system (DX Pro) can do before assuming a bigger renovation is the only fix.
