Brief description of the organization
The Office of Indigenous Relations (OIR) at the University of Waterloo is the central hub for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis students, staff, and faculty. Established to advance reconciliation and decolonization, the Indigenous-led unit oversees the Indigenous Strategic Plan, facilitates inclusive research, and provides cultural programming and advocacy.
Problem area
University campuses are often difficult to read as cultural landscapes. The University of Waterloo’s Indigenous Wayfinding Report notes that campuses can be “culturally thin” environments in which Indigenous histories, territorial relationships, and contemporary Indigenous presence are not readily visible in the built and open environments. The report argues that wayfinding should do more than help people move from one building to another. Rather, it should make Indigenous identities and connections to land more visible and create a more meaningful, memorable, and legible campus experience.
This creates a more complex engineering problem than simply attaching QR codes to signs.
A successful wayfinding and placemaking system must operate at the intersection of navigation, digital experience design, accessibility, data architecture, physical infrastructure, and community-informed storytelling. Projects at other institutions demonstrate this complexity. For example, Mapping Teejop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is not just a routing tool. Mapping Teejoop provides layered walking tours, place-based interpretation, pronunciation support, accessibility notes, and prompts for critical reflection on difficult Indigenous histories. Likewise, the University of Hawaiʻi’s Beyond Wayfinding initiative combines physical markers, bilingual interpretation, geospatial orientation, and Indigenous knowledge systems as an integrated campus infrastructure project rather than a simple communications add-on.
This capstone challenge, therefore, is to design a system that asks students to wrestle with competing requirements, including:
- How can a digital wayfinding system at the University of Waterloo guide users efficiently while also slowing them down enough to engage with place, history, language, and story?
- How should a system balance usability, accessibility, and technical robustness with the need for cultural care, contextual interpretation, and appropriate representation of Indigenous knowledge?
- What should be done when content is sensitive, contested, location-specific, seasonal, or subject to community review and revision over time? Mapping Teejop, for example, explicitly addresses difficult histories and includes content warnings, which points to the need for thoughtful content governance and user experience design.
- How can students design for different users such as new students, visitors, campus tour groups, Indigenous community members, and accessibility users, whose needs may not align? Waterloo’s Indigenous Wayfinding Report emphasizes that wayfinding must transform campus imageability for a wide range of daily users, and other campus examples show that one-size-fits-all wayfinding is inadequate.
In short, the challenge is not simply to build a network of digital markers. It is to prototype an integrated Indigenous wayfinding and storytelling system that responds to place, culture, user needs, institutional realities, and long-term operational sustainability. This makes it an appropriate and challenging capstone problem for senior engineering students.
Main objectives
The main objective of this capstone project is to design and prototype an Indigenous wayfinding and digital storytelling tour system for the University of Waterloo that supports accessible navigation, place-based learning, and Indigenous visibility across campus. This objective is aligned with Waterloo’s stated intention to recognize, honour, and educate the campus community about Indigenous Peoples, the lands the university occupies, and the territories on which it operates through a comprehensive system of signage and wayfinding.
More specifically, the project should aim to:
- Develop a multi-layered wayfinding concept that combines spatial navigation with narrative interpretation, rather than treating wayfinding as a purely directional exercise. Waterloo’s precedence work identifies (re)naming, narrative, and placemaking as core approaches used across campuses, suggesting that an effective solution must combine informational and experiential dimensions.
- Prototype a digital storytelling tour that allows users to move through campus while accessing curated Indigenous content tied to significant sites, routes, stories, languages, ecological features, artworks, and gathering places. Comparable projects such as Mapping Teejop show how campus tours can act as structured entry points into Indigenous histories and contemporary presence.
- Design for diverse users and contexts, including first-time visitors, current students, guided tours, accessible or universal design needs, and those seeking either a quick orientation experience or a deeper educational journey. Mapping Teejop’s use of accessibility notes and multiple themed tours, as well as Hawaiʻi’s emphasis on participatory navigation and orientation, suggest the value of flexible and differentiated user pathways.
- Address challenging engineering constraints such as indoor/outdoor transition, variable GPS accuracy, campus signal dead zones, weather exposure, multilingual content delivery, device compatibility, data management, and maintainability over time. Hawaiʻi’s example demonstrates that Indigenous wayfinding can become part of campus infrastructure, which implies lifecycle planning and systems integration, not merely a pilot website.
- Build an ethical content and governance framework that recognizes that not all knowledge should be treated as open, static, or universally transferable. The project should prompt students to think about who controls content updates, how approvals occur, what material is public-facing, how cultural protocols are respected, and how the platform remains accurate and relevant over time. The complexity of campus projects documented in the Waterloo report and at other institutions points to the need for engagement models and stewardship structures, not just technical deployment.
- Produce an implementable concept, including system architecture, prototype interfaces, physical-digital touchpoints, and an evaluation approach that can inform future campus implementation. Waterloo’s report frames this work as part of a broader institutional wayfinding initiative, so the capstone should generate something that can realistically inform planning and decision-making.
Scope of work
The capstone team will be expected to complete a substantial and interdisciplinary body of work. The scope should include the following elements:
- Context and User Research: Students will review Waterloo’s existing Indigenous wayfinding material and examine precedent examples from other campuses to understand how Indigenous wayfinding has been approached through naming, storytelling, mapping, signage, and placemaking. The Waterloo report explicitly identifies these categories as central to Indigenous wayfinding design, while examples such as Mapping Teejop and St. Lawrence College demonstrate how tours and place-specific teachings can be embedded in campus navigation. The team should also identify key user groups and usage scenarios, such as self-guided campus visitors, prospective students, incoming Indigenous students, faculty or staff leading tours, and community guests. These user scenarios should include accessibility and usability considerations, drawing from examples where route conditions, interpretive depth, and audience expectations vary significantly.
- System Definition and Requirements: Students will define the problem as a system-design challenge and specify functional and non-functional requirements. These may include route guidance, content triggering, bilingual or multilingual support, media handling, location accuracy, offline or low-connectivity functionality, accessibility compliance, analytics, ease of update, and long-term maintainability. The expectation is that students treat the project as a robust engineering system rather than a stand-alone webpage or signage exercise. This systems framing is consistent with Hawaiʻi’s campus-wide infrastructure approach and Waterloo’s broader institutional ambitions.
- Physical-Digital Integration: Students will develop concepts for how physical campus markers connect to digital storytelling content. This may include, but should not be limited to, QR codes. Teams should be encouraged to compare multiple interaction models such as QR/NFC triggers, geofenced locations, web-based mapping, mobile-first interfaces, or kiosk-style nodes and justify their recommendations based on reliability, accessibility, maintenance, and user experience. This is important because leading campus examples blend physical and digital formats rather than relying on a single access method.
- Prototype Tour Experience: The team will create a prototype of a pilot campus tour linking a selected set of significant sites. The prototype should demonstrate how users navigate the route, access stories, move between quick and deep content, hear or read Indigenous language elements where appropriate, and understand route conditions and accessibility constraints. Mapping Teejop is especially useful as a model because it includes thematic tours, route-specific accessibility notes, pronunciation features, and layered historical interpretation.
- Content Framework and Governance Model: Students are not expected to author or adjudicate Indigenous knowledge on their own. However, they should design a framework showing how content would be structured, tagged, reviewed, updated, and governed. This should include version control, review workflows, metadata structure, and the distinction between public-facing content and content that may require additional permissions or community approval. This makes the project more challenging and more realistic by recognizing that technical design and content stewardship are inseparable in this context. That challenge is underscored by the collaborative and consultative nature of the Waterloo and Hawaiʻi projects.
- Evaluation and Implementation Plan: The team should propose how the prototype would be evaluated, including usability testing, accessibility testing, route-testing, stakeholder feedback, content management feasibility, and implementation risks. They should also provide a staged roadmap for future development, indicating what would be required to move from prototype to campus deployment. Waterloo’s initiative is part of a larger institutional process, so recommendations should be realistic about procurement, updates, governance, and operational ownership.
Deliverables
- Report
- Website
- New protocols/processes
- Pilot campus tour
Team meeting frequency
Bi-weekly
Skills and training required
This capstone should be deliberately structured so that fourth-year engineering students are required to apply both technical and professional competencies.
1. Technical Skills
- Students should draw on skills in:
- Software and systems design, including architecture design, database/content structures, front-end prototyping, mobile/web interaction, and integration between physical and digital systems.
- Human-centred design and UX, including user research, prototyping, accessibility testing, and evaluation across different user groups.
- Geospatial and location-aware design, including campus mapping, route logic, navigation constraints, and environmental variability in outdoor/indoor settings.
- Hardware or embedded systems awareness, where relevant, for testing QR/NFC or location-triggered physical interfaces.
- Data governance and lifecycle planning, including system maintenance, update workflows, and stewardship of evolving content.
- These expectations are appropriate because successful campus wayfinding examples depend on coordinated work across interface design, environmental context, and infrastructure planning rather than a single technical specialty.
2. Professional and Contextual Training
- Students will also require some orientation beyond engineering tools alone. This project should include introductory training or guidance in:
- Indigenous cultural protocols and engagement principles, especially the importance of not treating Indigenous stories, place names, or language as generic content inputs. Waterloo’s Indigenous Wayfinding report and other campus initiatives (e.g. 2026 Campus Plan) make clear that Indigenous visibility work must be relational, consultative, and context-specific.
- Accessibility and inclusive design, including route conditions, screen-reader compatibility, multimodal content delivery, and the design of different user pathways. Mapping Teejop’s inclusion of route conditions and access notes provides a concrete example of this requirement.
- Ethics of digital storytelling, particularly where content involves trauma, historical violence, contested memory, or culturally sensitive material. Mapping Teejop’s content warnings illustrate that interpretation design must anticipate user care and emotional response.
- Interdisciplinary collaboration, since project success will depend on working with advisors and stakeholders from Indigenous Relations, communications, design, planning, accessibility, and technical services. The Waterloo and Hawaiʻi examples both highlight broad cross-campus participation.
Resources required
To complete the capstone successfully, students should have access to the following resources:
1. Institutional and Advisory Resources
- Background documents and precedent material, including the University of Waterloo Indigenous Wayfinding Report and Waterloo’s existing Indigenization tour/story map material. These offer both conceptual grounding and local context.
- Advisory input from the Office of Indigenous Relations and relevant campus partners, to help students understand local priorities, site significance, and appropriate pathways for content development and review. The collaborative nature of Waterloo’s report indicates that meaningful participation from multiple stakeholders is central to this work.
- Access to campus planning, facilities, communications, and accessibility units, particularly if the team is expected to consider long-term implementation feasibility. This reflects how other institutions have treated Indigenous wayfinding as part of broader campus infrastructure and public-facing systems.
2. Technical Resources
- Campus base maps, spatial data, and site photographs.
- Prototyping software and development tools for web/mobile experience design.
- Access to analytics, usability testing tools, and accessibility auditing tools.
- If appropriate, hardware or materials for testing physical-digital touchpoints such as QR/NFC markers, weather-resistant sign concepts, or low-power pilot devices.
3. Precedent and Learning Resources
- Students should be encouraged to examine precedent projects such as:
- Mapping Teejop (University of Wisconsin–Madison) for digital campus tours, layered interpretation, pronunciation support, accessibility notes, and critical reflection.
- Beyond Wayfinding (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) for bilingual physical-digital integration, Indigenous orientation systems, and the treatment of wayfinding as campus infrastructure.
- St. Lawrence College Indigenous Campus Wayfinding for embedding place-specific teachings into campus navigation and signage.
- Waterloo’s own precedence review for examples of (re)naming, narrative, and placemaking across post-secondary campuses.
NDA or a commercialization agreement for this project?
Yes