Estée Lauder R&D Centre Wayfinding
Type
Wayfinding, Environmental Graphics
Role
Senior Brand Designer, Gensler
The Challenge
When Estée Lauder Companies opened their new R&D centre in Shanghai, they needed more than a wayfinding system. The building houses five floors of distinct work: lab science, packaging, formulation, molecular discovery, and creative ideation. It needed a visual language that tied all of it together, gave people orientation, and felt genuinely rooted in Shanghai rather than dropped in from a global template.
The Solution
The entire EGD program was built around Wu Xing (五行), the Five Elements of Chinese philosophy. Each element was assigned to a floor based on the nature of the work happening there: Water on the ground floor lab, where ideas are still fluid and forming; Metal on the packaging and design floor, referencing material and precision; Fire on formulation, where ingredients are combined and transformed; Earth on the molecular discovery floor, grounded in nature and sustainability; Wood at the top, where ideation and creation happen. The elements weren't decorative. They shaped the visual language of each floor: colour palette, material references, art direction, and the spatial mood. So a researcher moving between floors experiences a shift in atmosphere that reinforces what that floor is for. The building becomes legible through feeling as much as through signage. Throughout the building, typographic moments draw on the Estée Lauder brand story: quotes, words, fragments of the company's history. These run as a second layer across all five floors, connecting people to the brand they're working for regardless of where they sit. The digital wayfinding system was integrated into the same framework, extending the floor themes into the screens and ensuring the physical and digital experience stayed coherent.
