In the mid-1950s, when Jane Davis Doggett was earning a master’s degree at Yale’s Graduate School of Art and Architecture, she was surrounded by students and professors who were focused on the arenas, malls, medical centers, transit hubs and other huge projects that were coming to define America’s postwar era of prosperity and urban renewal. Ms. Doggett had a different interest. “Projects were new, complicated and big,” she recalled in a 2013 interview with the designer Tracy Turner posted on the website of the Society for Experiential Graphic Design. “It occurred to me to think about the person coming to these behemoths and what the human scale should be and how this person would find his way and make use of the place.”The field she began working in didn’t really have a name at the time but is now called environmental graphic design. She became one of its founding figures, coming up with systems to help people navigate complex spaces, a specialty called “wayfinding.”Airports were a calling: In Miami, Houston, Baltimore and several dozen other cities, Ms. Doggett used color coding, symbols, uniform signage and other touches to help travelers find their way around airports that would have otherwise been more intimidating.

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