Placemaking. Wayfinding. Navigation. Getting from A to B. When done well, it feels as if an invisible hand is gently guiding each person in the direction they need to go. For more than 20 years, Soren Luckins, founder of Melbourne-based Büro North, together with partner Brooke Murray and their team have been this invisible guiding hand. To mark the significance of their 20-year milestone, journalist Stephen Todd spoke with the Büro North team about their humble beginnings and the paths they’ve travelled to become one of Australasia’s leading wayfinding design studios. 

Büro North knows their work is successful when no one notices it. When the 250,000 commuters passing through Sydney’s revamped Central Station each day intuitively find their way via a nexus of nodes and tunnels to one of 26 platforms and onward to their destination. When joggers flash by along the coastal Spit trail on Queensland’s Gold Coast without a second thought for navigating their way. When the pathways of plaintiff and accused never cross at Bendigo Law Courts; as sports fans surge through Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium; while families amble, carefree, through a 10-acre park planted atop a mega-shopping complex in Kuala Lumpur.

For two decades now, Büro North has been the compass by which citizens unknowingly chart paths through urban agglomerations across Australia and the Asia Pacific. 

Led by Soren Luckins and his business partner Brooke Murray, Büro North is ahead of the field in wayfinding and customer-centred design (CCD), pioneering the application of gaming software such as Unreal Engine and Enscape to model VR environments in tandem with concrete architectural developments. 

“No matter where we practise, our job is about understanding the unique essence of an environment and articulating and amplifying it to generate a sense of ease that resonates with people,” says Luckins, founder and director of Büro North, which creates design and strategy for people and place “from a moment to a metropolis”.

Büro North’s first client, in 2004, was Multiplex which was then building the Melbourne Showgrounds. 

“At that stage, there was no science or process behind what I was doing,” recalls Luckins. “I was a designer going, ‘Where do we need a sign?’ I would get a bit of 2×4 from the hardware store, some foam and a few printouts and stand there with the architects and say, ‘This is what we want to do and this is where it’s going to go’. And everyone would sign off and we’d do it.”

Luckins settled on Büro North as the name for his nascent agency because, having studied graphic design in Gottingen, he was “obsessed with Germany”.

“I chose ‘büro’ because it means ‘studio’ in German, and then ‘north’, because my early freelancing work with a lot of architectural practices meant that I was doing drawings that all had one thing in common – a North symbol to orient the design. Then, as I moved into wayfinding under my own steam, the meaning serendipitously shifted to denote a universal reference point or North Star.”

A few years into the practice, in 2008, Büro North secured the Royal Children’s Hospital as a client and “placemaking became the conscious driver of our thinking”.

“We didn’t yet use the “p” word,” recalls Luckins. “At the time the term was ‘environmental theming’ which seemed to encapsulate what we were doing: contributing something to generate an emotional outcome.

“Essentially, our approach to evidence-based design evolved incrementally to the point that with Sydney Metro we had 1000 people with VR gear testing the stations before they were built. But fundamentally it’s still about studying peoples’ behaviour to create environments in which the public, in all their glorious differences, can flourish.”

When Brooke Murray joined Büro North in 2014, she remembers thinking: “Half a dozen words on a sign, how hard can that be? I had no idea of the psychology behind it.”

As general manager, then managing director and, since 2021, business partner, Murray has pushed the practice inexorably into the future.

“Once efficient structures of accountability, reporting and governance were in place, powerful project management mechanisms followed, and today we are able to deliver excellence at scale, for ever bigger and more complex clients,” Murray says.

Clients as diverse as the Australian War Memorial, Westfield London, the Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI) and the Saudi Arabian NEOM meta-urban development.

However, it was Sydney’s Central Station that, as Murray admits, “pushed us to a whole new limit”.

“With these big infrastructure projects, success relies on the careful management of stakeholders. And on this project, there were so many.”

“It was one of the longest, ongoing challenges we’d ever had,” concurs Nicole Waterman, technical leader at Laing O’Rourke, the engineering company contracted to deliver Central Station Sydney Metro.

“The scope and requirements changed throughout the life of the project and given the complexity of the brief and the historical overlay, wayfinding was a particular challenge. Thankfully, we had Büro North to guide us.”

It was on Central Station, and with the Sydney Metro system more broadly – where Büro North was also working on the Martin Place and Crows Nest stations – that Murray, Luckins and their team refined their unique approach to customer-centred design (CCD).

“The brief was essentially to make the whole system smooth,” recounts Chris Thorpe, Büro North’s Technical Director. “It was a massive rabbit warren, and we had to work out how people behaved and what the friction points were. So, we had to go in and review everything, do a full pain-points journey analysis to say “there are some areas that work and these are the areas that don’t work. And this is the feedback we’re getting from customers about why it doesn’t work.”

Murray says weeks were spent on site doing testing. “There was a lot of shadowing people, a lot of task analysis,” he says. “We engaged a recruitment company to find hundreds of specific representative people to enable us to do an analysis of the overall users of the site. Let’s say, if there are 100 users at Central, we know six are going to be mobility impaired, three are going to be vision impaired and one will have a dog. So, we then test different elements of the site with those people. And it’s fascinating because no matter how good at design you are, you don’t actually know what someone’s lived experience of it will be until you’ve taken the time to see it from their perspective.”

Luckins and Murray further pushed their CCD capacity by initiating a hybrid “mixed reality” model in partnership with Siemens for the delivery of the new Western Sydney Airport Line connecting to the CBD.

“We worked with a mock train carriage made of MDF and bits of steel, raw and architectural,” Murray explains. “Then we used virtual reality so that, once you put on the VR goggles you experience the carriage in a complete state – from door opening motion to the height of seats and accessibility of handrail devices through to the materials and the colours of fittings and upholstery. Even though you’re standing in a static environment, it appears to come alive, even indicating the effect of motion on the view from the windows. This allows us to fully anticipate and modulate the way people will move through and interact with the environment.”

On the platforms and in the transition zones, Büro North oversaw the gamut of elements “right down to details about ways to drink from the water cooler or operate toilet buttons”.

This 360-degree design strategy not only delivers an excellent user experience for today, it positions Sydney Metro to accommodate the anticipated 450,000 commuters that will pass through its system daily by 2050.

Another recent project that tested Büro North’s mettle was the Bendigo Law Courts, “the first multi-jurisdictional court in Victoria,” explains Murray. “They were intent on delivering a customer experience that minimised stress, no matter the reason for being there.”

“It gets very complicated,” continues Luckins, “because you’ve got cases where names can’t be used and where parties must be separated. In terms of wayfinding, you’ve got victims and accused turning up to the same facility – and part of the service design is about making sure they arrive at different times and are held in different areas to avoid issues. The journey map is probably one of the most complicated we’ve had to create and deliver.”

Until, perhaps, they were commissioned to develop the wayfinding and placemaking system for a 10-acre park atop a behemothic lifestyle precinct – a linchpin “strategic enabler” of the Malaysian government’s Economic Transformation Programme – in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur. 

“It was such an extraordinarily important and complex development, strategically, economically and culturally,” says Leonie So, then senior project manager at Lendlease, the international construction and real estate company.

For Luckins and Murray, the Kuala Lumpur project signals the future direction of Büro North. As they celebrate 20 years at the spearhead of their industry, they are not resting on their laurels but activating plans to expand beyond the region with work already coalescing in the United Arab Emirates. 

At Kuala Lumpur, Büro North was tasked to work with Matthew Holloway, principal of Grimshaw’s Southern Asia Business and his architectural and urban planning team to deliver a park-in-the-sky concept that could draw people up from the street and give them the ease and means to spend a whole day’s leisure there.

“The basic challenge was: How do you make a wonderful green asset that sits 20 metres above the ground appear accessible, attractive and a natural option for visitors?” asks Holloway, rhetorically. “You need to make it supremely clear to people that the park exists, that they can get there in a seamless and effortless way, and make it feel like it belongs to the people rather than belonging to, say, the developer. That was the biggest single challenge, and it’s very specific to this project.”

Büro North’s response was to meld the wayfinding with the architecture itself – which had been consciously designed to suggest a porosity to the street – and throughout the rooftop green spaces designed by Oculus. In the abundance of options, from caves to waterscapes to forest settings and wide lawn area, the layout defers to the diversity of background and experience of the users, a demographic that regularly spans toddlers to pensioners.

“It’s a landscape that the user can move through and yet be visible from wherever they are around the perimeter of the site, Holloway points out. “The designers have leaned heavily on the landscape itself to articulate an intuitive way of moving throughout what might otherwise be quite foreboding terrain.”

“It was about so much more than simply putting up signage,” So says. 

“Büro North realised the wayfinding needed to act as a way of connecting people and place and needed to be about respecting and enabling the many different cultures to have equal agency in the place. Yes, they needed to provide people with efficient pathways to move in, across and out of the space, but their great skill was in providing highly nuanced personal experience all along the way. They arrived at that outcome by conducting extensive and deep research with representative local cultural groups, something I have seen no other agency do with such a level of empathy and engagement.”

For Holloway, Büro North’s masterly manipulation of space excels not just because “it doesn’t fight against the architecture” but because “it allows the architecture to excel itself, to be even better”.

From 2×4 timber and foam to high-tech VR headsets and gaming software, Büro North has come a long way — and hopefully, you’ve never noticed.

Words by Stephen Todd, commissioned by Büro North. Republished with permission