Wayfinding in People with Alzheimer’s Disease: Perspective Taking and Architectural Cognition—A Vision Paper on Future Dementia Care Research Opportunities

Based on a targeted literature review, this vision paper emphasizes the importance of dementia-sensitive built space. The article specifically focuses on supporting spatial orientation and wayfinding for people living with dementia. First, we discuss types of wayfinding challenges, underlying processes, and consequences of spatial disorientation in the context of dementia of the Alzheimer’s type. Second, we focus on current efforts aimed at planning and evaluating dementia-sensitive built space, i.e., environmental design principles, interventions, evaluation tools, strategies, and planning processes. Third, we use our findings as a starting point for developing an interdisciplinary research vision aimed at encouraging further debates and research about: (1) the perspective of a person with dementia, specifically in the context of wayfinding and spatial orientation, and (2) how this perspective supplements planning and design processes of dementia-sensitive built space. We conclude that more closely considering the perspective of people with dementia supports the development of demographically sustainable future cities and care institutions

Examining trade-offs between social, psychological, and energy potential of urban form

Urban planners are often challenged with the task of developing design solutions which must meet multiple, and often contradictory, criteria. In this paper, we investigated the trade-offs between social, psychological, and energy potential of the fundamental elements of urban form: the street network and the building massing. Since formal methods to evaluate urban form from the psychological and social point of view are not readily available, we developed a methodological framework to quantify these criteria as the first contribution in this paper. To evaluate the psychological potential, we conducted a three-tiered empirical study starting from real world environments and then abstracting them to virtual environments. In each context, the implicit (physiological) response and explicit (subjective) response of pedestrians were measured. To quantify the social potential, we developed a street network centrality-based measure of social accessibility. For the energy potential, we created an energy model to analyze the impact of pure geometric form on the energy demand of the building stock. The second contribution of this work is a method to identify distinct clusters of urban form and, for each, explore the trade-offs between the select design criteria. We applied this method to two case studies identifying nine types of urban form and their respective potential trade-offs, which are directly applicable for the assessment of strategic decisions regarding urban form during the early planning stages

Exploring Individual Differences and Building Complexity in Wayfinding:The Case of the Seattle Central Library

This article focuses on the interactions between individual differences and building characteristics that may occur during multilevel wayfinding. Using the Seattle Central Library as our test case, we defined a series of within-floor and between-floor wayfinding tasks based on different building analyses of this uniquely designed structure. Tracking our 59 participants while they completed assigned tasks on-site, we examined their wayfinding performance across tasks and in relation to a variety of individual differences measures and wayfinding strategies. Both individual differences and spatial configuration, as well as the organization of the physical space, were related to the wayfinding challenges inherent to this library. We also found wayfinding differences based on other, nonspatial features, such as semantic expectations about destinations. Together, these results indicate that researchers and building planners must consider the interactions among building, human, and task characteristics in a more nuanced fashion

Machine learning approaches to understand the influence of urban environments on human’s physiological response

This research proposes a framework for signal processing and information fusion of spatial-temporal multi-sensor data pertaining to understanding patterns of humans physiological changes in an urban environment. The framework includes signal frequency unification, signal pairing, signal filtering, signal quantification, and data labeling. Furthermore, this paper contributes to human-environment interaction research, where a field study to understand the influence of environmental features such as varying sound level, illuminance, field-of-view, or environmental conditions on humans’ perception was proposed. In the study, participants of various demographic backgrounds walked through an urban environment in Zürich, Switzerland while wearing physiological and environmental sensors. Apart from signal processing, four machine learning techniques, classification, fuzzy rule-based inference, feature selection, and clustering, were applied to discover relevant patterns and relationship between the participants’ physiological responses and environmental conditions. The predictive models with high accuracies indicate that the change in the field-of-view corresponds to increased participant arousal. Among all features, the participants’ physiological responses were primarily affected by the change in environmental conditions and field-of-view

Aesthetic and Emotional Appraisal of the Seattle Public Library and its relation to spatial configuration

How does the spatial configuration of a building influence aesthetic appraisal and emotion? Previous studies on wayfinding have included studying the effects of spatial layout and complexity, visual access, and the degree of spatial differentiation on users’ cognition and way finding behavior, yet have rarely assessed the user's aesthetic and emotional evaluation of a building. Space syntax methods have been widely used for quantification, e.g., of how socially integrated and how navigable space is and complemented by behavioral data, and information about users’ individual wayfinding strategies and cognitive abilities, space syntax has been a strong analytical tool in wayfinding studies. It is an open question to what degree the space syntax methodology can also capture aesthetic judgments or the emotional impact of a public building on visitors and inhabitants. These aspects of a building’s impact are clearly relevant for design research and practitioners alike and research data is necessary to develop the corresponding discourse. This paper contributes a set of qualitative data on subjective user evaluations from a wayfinding study in the Seattle Public Library to support the ongoing dialogue between the space syntax community and cognitive scientists. The building was selected because it has previously been subject to research (e.g., Dalton, Kuliga & Hoelscher, 2013; Zook & Bafna, 2012, Dovey & Dovey, 2009), and received both high praise and strong criticism, which illustrates the buildings' value as a research site. In this study, participants selected six out of 76 adjectives from an adjusted version of the Microsoft product Reaction Card Desirability Toolkit that, in their opinions, best described the Seattle Public Library. In a semi-structured interview, participants were further encouraged to verbally reflect on the experience they had during six wayfinding tasks in the Seattle Public Library, to describe their wayfinding difficulties, and to elaborate on the adjectives chosen from the reaction card task. A standardized questionnaire assessed their aesthetic and emotional appraisal in terms of general evaluation, attractiveness, security, and privacy for key locations in the library (entrance levels and meeting rooms) and the library as a whole. Participants chose adjectives such as impressive, creative, stimulating, and innovative to describe their experience in the library, but also inconsistent, overwhelming, frustrating, intimidating, and stressful. This paper aims to develop an understanding of how these two clusters of mixed user opinions are related to the building’s spatial structure. A visibility graph analysis (VGA) was conducted to identify where and how difficulties in understanding the library’s unconventional circulation arise for library visitors. This paper makes a contribution to the field by suggesting methods for linking qualitative, and often highly emotive, data to objective spatial analysis

Wayfinding in People with Alzheimer’s Disease: Perspective Taking and Architectural Cognition—A Vision Paper on Future Dementia Care Research Opportunities

Based on a targeted literature review, this vision paper emphasizes the importance of dementia-sensitive built space. The article specifically focuses on supporting spatial orientation and wayfinding for people living with dementia. First, we discuss types of wayfinding challenges, underlying processes, and consequences of spatial disorientation in the context of dementia of the Alzheimer’s type. Second, we focus on current efforts aimed at planning and evaluating dementia-sensitive built space, i.e., environmental design principles, interventions, evaluation tools, strategies, and planning processes. Third, we use our findings as a starting point for developing an interdisciplinary research vision aimed at encouraging further debates and research about: (1) the perspective of a person with dementia, specifically in the context of wayfinding and spatial orientation, and (2) how this perspective supplements planning and design processes of dementia-sensitive built space. We conclude that more closely considering the perspective of people with dementia supports the development of demographically sustainable future cities and care institutions

Wayfinding in People with Alzheimer’s Disease: Perspective Taking and Architectural Cognition—A Vision Paper on Future Dementia Care Research Opportunities

Based on a targeted literature review, this vision paper emphasizes the importance of dementia-sensitive built space. The article specifically focuses on supporting spatial orientation and wayfinding for people living with dementia. First, we discuss types of wayfinding challenges, underlying processes, and consequences of spatial disorientation in the context of dementia of the Alzheimer’s type. Second, we focus on current efforts aimed at planning and evaluating dementia-sensitive built space, i.e., environmental design principles, interventions, evaluation tools, strategies, and planning processes. Third, we use our findings as a starting point for developing an interdisciplinary research vision aimed at encouraging further debates and research about: (1) the perspective of a person with dementia, specifically in the context of wayfinding and spatial orientation, and (2) how this perspective supplements planning and design processes of dementia-sensitive built space. We conclude that more closely considering the perspective of people with dementia supports the development of demographically sustainable future cities and care institutions

Wayfinding in People with Alzheimer’s Disease: Perspective Taking and Architectural Cognition—A Vision Paper on Future Dementia Care Research Opportunities

Based on a targeted literature review, this vision paper emphasizes the importance of dementia-sensitive built space. The article specifically focuses on supporting spatial orientation and wayfinding for people living with dementia. First, we discuss types of wayfinding challenges, underlying processes, and consequences of spatial disorientation in the context of dementia of the Alzheimer’s type. Second, we focus on current efforts aimed at planning and evaluating dementia-sensitive built space, i.e., environmental design principles, interventions, evaluation tools, strategies, and planning processes. Third, we use our findings as a starting point for developing an interdisciplinary research vision aimed at encouraging further debates and research about: (1) the perspective of a person with dementia, specifically in the context of wayfinding and spatial orientation, and (2) how this perspective supplements planning and design processes of dementia-sensitive built space. We conclude that more closely considering the perspective of people with dementia supports the development of demographically sustainable future cities and care institutions

POE 2.0: exploring the potential of social media for capturing unsolicited post occupancy evaluations

This paper presents a scoping study in which unsolicited, user feedback of Seattle Public Library was gathered from selected social media and user-review websites to determine the viability of utilising social media as a novel and unconventional approach to POE. Fourteen social media/review websites were surveyed and all available review-data were extracted. This resulted in a rich dataset of almost 500 reviews, which were subject to further analyses of temporal and geographic patterns, numerical ratings and the semantic content of the reviews. The study’s results suggest building users are quite willing to share, without solicitation, their experiences. The results showed: a high proportion of local reviewers (40%); highly regular, temporal patterns of posting, suggesting a sustained interest in reviewing over a period of seven years; numerical ratings suggesting that comments were not dominated by highly opinionated, extreme reviewers but represented a broad range of views; geographic differences in the semantic content of the reviews. The paper suggests that highly valuable information is currently available from peer-to-peer networks and that this forms a new class of POE-data which is radically different to current POE paradigms. It concludes that this data might be most valuable through augmenting, and not supplanting, traditional POE