Wayknowing is a design approach that helps anticipate and orchestrate personal journeys.

When planning trips from A to B or navigating unfamiliar cities, we constantly juggle unknowns. Whether headed across town or the world, it’s mentally taxing to orchestrate all of the contextual elements of a multi-leg journey: time, distance, weather, expenses, parking, accessibility, and crowds, to name a few.

On the one hand, we have wayfinding (mapping and transit) platforms that help predict the “where and when” of our arrivals. On the other hand, social and content platforms can inform us about the conditions—the “what and how”—of our destinations. And we often get mired in the gaps in between.

Blending these two worlds of destination guidance and destination knowledge is a new approach to human-centered design, coined here as Wayknowing.

This site aims to raise awareness of the information gaps that often leave us sifting and sorting single-purpose apps, search engines, and content sites when planning excursions. Given our modern-day tools, urban planners, wayfinding specialists, information architects, and UX designers should better recognize and address the elements of our journeys that are unknown but knowable.