Ruth Dalton

The Secret Is To Follow Your Nose Route Path Selection and Angularity

This article presents an experiment in which route choice decisions made at road junctions are recorded. Such routes can be expressed as the sum of individual decisions made or potential decisions available throughout a journey. Relationships between these aggregate values are assessed statistically, indicating that participants’ decisions correlate more strongly with maximum angles of incidence of road center lines (leading from a junction) than to mean or minimum angles. One interpretation is that participants appear to be attempting to conserve linearity throughout their journey. However, informal observations of participants traversing urban grids cast doubt on the proposed theories of the conservation of angular linearity, requiring the theory’s modification. The resultant hypothesis combines principles of a conservation of linearity while also minimizing the angular difference between pairs of bearings; the key bearings are the directions of potential route choices and a perceived bearing of the wayfinding goal as judged from sequential instances of the observer’s location.

Getting Lost in Buildings

People often get lost in buildings, including but not limited to libraries, hospitals, conference centers, and shopping malls. There are at least three contributing factors: the spatial structure of the building, the cognitive maps that users construct as they navigate, and the strategies and spatial abilities of the building users. The goal of this article is to discuss recent research on each of these factors and to argue for an integrative framework that encompasses these factors and their intersections, focusing on the correspondence between the building and the cognitive map, the completeness of the cognitive map as a function of the strategies and individual abilities of the users, the compatibility between the building and the strategies and individual abilities of the users, and complexity that emerges from the intersection of all three factors. We end with an illustrative analysis in which we apply this integrative framework to difficulty in way-finding.

Linking objective measures of space to cognition and action

This article reviews the synergy between a number of differing academic disciplines with reference to the study of spatial cognition. It identifies three potential areas for future collaboration: understanding the relationships between the form of the physical world and mental representations, linking space to action, and creating alternative methods and approaches for studying environmental cognition. After discussing the possibilities for collaboration within each of these areas, the article continues by reviewing in detail the articles contained within this special edition. An attempt is made to identify common ground and links between the different articles, illustrating how they might relate both to each other and to the areas of future research identified earlier.

Measuring environments for public displays: a space syntax approach

This paper reports on an on-going project, which is investigating the role that location plays in the visibility of information presented on a public display. Spatial measures are presented, derived from the architectural theory of Space Syntax. These are shown to relate to the memorability of words and images presented on different displays. Results show a complex pattern of interactions between the size and shape of spaces in which displays are situated and the memorability of different types of representations depicted. This approach offers a new way to consider the role of space in guiding and constraining interaction in real settings: a growing concern within HCI and Ubicomp.

Four Applications of Embodied Cognition

This article presents the views of four sets of authors, each taking concepts of embodied cognition into problem spaces where the new paradigm can be applied. The first considers consequences of embodied cognition on the legal system. The second explores how embodied cognition can change how we interpret and interact with art and literature. The third examines how we move through architectural spaces from an embodied cognition perspective. And the fourth addresses how music cognition is influenced by the approach. Each contribution is brief. They are meant to suggest the potential reach of embodied cognition, increase the visibility of applications, and inspire potential avenues for research.

Discursive design thinking: The role of explicit knowledge in creative architectural design reasoning

Abstract The main hypothesis investigated in this paper is based upon the suggestion that the discursive reasoning in architecture supported by an explicit knowledge of spatial configurations can enhance both design productivity and the intelligibility of design solutions. The study consists of an examination of an architects performance while solving intuitively a well-defined problem followed by an analysis of the spatial structure of their design solutions. One group of architects will attempt to solve the design problem logically, rationalizing their design decisions by implementing their explicit knowledge of spatial configurations. The other group will use an implicit form of such knowledge arising from their architectural education to reason about their design acts. An integrated model of protocol analysis combining linkography and macroscopic coding is used to analyze the design processes. The resulting design outcomes will be evaluated quantitatively in terms of their spatial configurations. The analysis appears to show that an explicit knowledge of the rules of spatial configurations, as possessed by the first group of architects can partially enhance their function-driven judgment producing permeable and well-structured spaces. These findings are particularly significant as they imply that an explicit rather than an implicit knowledge of the fundamental rules that make a layout possible can lead to a considerable improvement in both the design process and product. This suggests that by externalizing the design knowledge and restructuring it in a design model, creative thought can efficiently be evolved and stimulated.

Small-Graph Matching and Building Genotypes

This paper introduces a new method, known as small-graph matching, and demonstrates how it may be used to determine the genotype signature of a sample of buildings. First, the origins of the method and its relationship to other ‘similarity’ testing techniques are discussed. Then the range of possible actions and transformations are established through the creation of a set of rules. The next section of the paper suggests which real-world actions would be represented by such transformations, were the graph representing a building. By considering the real-world equivalent actions, as opposed to transformations at the level of the graph abstraction, a system of costs or weightings is developed and subsequently applied to the range of possible actions. Next, in order to fully explain this method, a technique of normalizing the similarity measure is presented in order to permit the comparison of graphs of differing magnitude. The last stage of this method is presented, this being the comparison of all possible graph pairs within a given sample and the mean distance calculated for all individual graphs. This results in the identification of a genotype signature. Finally, the paper presents an empirical application of this method and shows how effective it is, not only for the identification of a building genotype, but also for assessing the homogeneity of a sample or subsamples.

The Theory of Natural Movement and its Application to the Simulation of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET)

The theory of natural movement is fundamental to space syntax: a set of theories and methods developed in the late 1970s that seeks, at a general level, to reveal the mutual effects of complex spatial systems on society and vice versa. In particular, over the years, space syntax analyses have been shown to correlate highly with pedestrian movement and hence are regularly used as a predictive tool, to forecast relative levels of people-flow along streets. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are wireless networks that are self- creating, having an unfixed and constantly shifting topology. This paper demonstrates how ad hoc networks based on pedestrians carrying mobile wireless devices can be simulated using the theory of natural movement. It suggests that the application of natural movement simulations to mobile ad hoc networks appears to be a useful contribution to the field and that further work should be conducted in this area.

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

This article presents a scoping study in which unsolicited user feedback of the Seattle Public Library was gathered from selected social media and user-review websites to determine the viability of utilizing social media as a novel and unconventional approach to post-occupancy evaluation (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 subjected to further analyses of temporal and geographical patterns, numerical ratings and the semantic content of the reviews. The studys 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; geographical differences in the semantic content of the reviews. The article suggests that highly valuable information is currently available from peer-to-peer networks and that this forms a new class of POE-data which are radically different from current POE paradigms. It concludes that these data might be most valuable through augmenting, and not supplanting, traditional POE.

INTEGRATING SPACE-SYNTAX AND DISCRETE-EVENT SIMULATION FOR E-MOBILITY ANALYSIS

Modeling and simulation of dynamic systems has been commonly used in the context of transportation, urban planning, and land use as being the basic tool for planners and policy makers. Vehicular movement modeling is one of the most popular models that deal with relevant aspects of urban regions and communities. This paper focuses on a particular mobility system; electric vehicles (EVs) clusters. It presents a study was conducted to simulate EVs population of the inner urban core of Newcastle-Gateshead via a developed 2D simulation model. The novelty of this study is the new approach proposed to simulate EV population in particular vicinity. This is by utilizing hybrid simulation technique (agent based modeling and discrete events) while applying space syntax theory and principles to predict the travel demand pattern of the urban system. The combination of these layers of modeling within the context of electrical mobility has proven successful in portraying the population and showed promising results. It aims at providing guidelines and recommendations to locate preliminary charging points and determine their numbers and capacities, which should be of interest for researchers, planning authorities and policy makers. This paper is a part of an EU project that focuses on simulating a part of the North Sea Region e-mobility system.