A Sense of Place: Sense of Direction

Nowadays, navigation systems in cars have become quite indispensable to many of us, who have a poor sense of direction. Sadly many of them are quite impossible to use: some don't have a logical structure, others are tricky to navigate or give inaccurate directions.

Programming such systems is a challenge in itself. People react differently to information and globalizing a stereotypical navigation system wouldn't work. For this reason, they must be localized for different races of people, according to left or right-hand drive, language, age, visual images...

(curtesy of gettyimages)

left/right-hand drive: navigation systems must be operated with different hands, depending on a country's driving policy (on which side the steering wheel is on e.g. right side in UK, Ireland, Australia, South Africa etc.) and must be devised accordingly (except Tom toms).
language: languages with long words, like German, make it difficoult to fit information on the screen and vice versa i.e. Japanese or Chinese characters.
age: elderly people's reactions are slower and their eye sight isn't as sharp; bigger buttons must be used, to make them easier to see, voice control is being introduced in many car systems and most buttons are being transferred to the steering wheel so elderly people don't have to reach as much and risk tyring their muscles.
visual images: countries like China or Japan prefer video-graphic or animated displays with fancy graphics. This is due to their extremely visual sense, based on their culture and writing (characters), which represent graphic images and symbols.

(curtesy of www.smh.com.au)

Some cities are based on grid patterns (see New York or Roman cities), others derive from Medieval times and are based on a more nucleated structure (many European cities like London).
Cities laid out in grid pattern are easier to navigate, therefore using a navigation systemm is easier.
There is evidence of grid pattern laid-out cities, dating back to 2000 BC. In China (1500BC) there was a strict lay-out design for cities, with 9 main streets that crisscrossed a city and four important points of reference (buildings or temples), set to the North, South, East and West of a city.
The Roman castra plan was basted on a composition for the defence of military camps.
The Hippodamian plan, Ancient Greeks used, was based on the designs by Hippodamos of Miletus, Greek architect, urban planner and mathematician (5th century BC).
These structures were later adapted by colonizing Europeans in the New World (16th century), to build their new cities.