Providing unambiguous, succinct descriptions of routes for pedestrians to follow is very challenging. Route descriptions vary according to many things, such as route length and complexity, availability of easily identifiable landmarks, and personal preferences. It is well known that the inclusion of a variety of landmarks facilitates route following – either at key decision points, or as a confirmatory cue. Many of the existing solutions, however, behave like car navigation systems and do not include references to such landmarks. The broader ambition of this research is the automatic generation of route descriptions that cater specifically to the needs of the pedestrian. More specifically this research describes empirical evidence gathered to identify the information requirements for an automated pedestrian navigation system. The results of three experiments helped to identify the criteria that govern the relative saliency of features of interest within an urban environment. There are a large variety of features of interest (together with their descriptions) that can be used as directional aids within route descriptions (for example buildings, statues, monuments, hills, and roads). A set of variables were developed in order to measure the saliency of the different classes of features. The experiments revealed that the most important measures of saliency included name, size, age, and colour. This empirical work formed the basis of the development of a pedestrian navigation system that incorporated the automatic identification of features of interest using the City of Edinburgh as the study area. Additionally the system supported the calculation of the saliency of a feature of interest, the development of an intervisibility model for the route to be navigated to determine the best feature of interest to use at each decision point along the route. Finally, the pedestrian navigation system was evaluated against route descriptions gathered from a random set of individuals to see how efficiently the system reflected the more natural and richer route description that people typically generate. This work shows that modelling features of interest is the key to the automatic generation of route descriptions that can be readily understood and followed by pedestrians.

Wayfinding is the process of determining and following a route. Survivors of acquired brain injury (ABI) may evince impaired wayfinding skills. Mobile technology offers a promising avenue for wayfinding support, but software is seldom designed for users with cognitive impairments. This research was intended to inform the design of mobile wayfinding software for survivors of ABI. Two qualitative studies were conducted to investigate wayfinding by survivors of ABI, and solicit views on a prospective mobile wayfinding aide. Data were used to generate a substantive theory of wayfinding in ABI. Participants were generally enthused by the prospect of a mobile wayfinding aide. They felt that it would be useful and bolster confidence, leading to improved community access. In conjunction with the theory and its implications, their remarks on usage and design indicate that mobile wayfinding software should: provide a simple interface; be context aware; afford an interactive user experience; integrate with calendar software; deliver [audio] notifications; and emphasize landmarks while affording map access. / Graduate

Prior research about wayfinding has found that females tend to employ a single strategy based on landmarks, where males are more versatile, using a dual strategy of landmarks and global orientation information such as cardinal directions (Lawton, 2010). It was proposed that this difference occurs due to males’ better sense of direction, which would deliver more trustworthy indications of current heading. Since males’ versatility has often been linked with better navigation performance (for example Sandstrom, Kaufman, & Huettel, 1998; Saucier et al., 2002) this study sought to contribute to the growing body of literature on methods of training to increase sense of direction (such as Hund and Minarik, 2006; Hund & Nazarczuk, 2009). An experimental procedure was used to investigate the possibility that the provision of reliable cardinal direction heading updates to participants would lead to a dual strategy for orientation in those that usually use a single strategy based on landmarks. This was done in an urban navigation context, with the main dependent variable being level of recall for route structure. Using the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction Scale, the study revealed that males had a higher self-reported sense of direction than females. / Additionally, no sex differences in performance were found on the route structure recall tasks. Rather than being due to females’ use of a dual wayfinding strategy, however, this was interpreted as an artefact of the use of a video in the procedure, which involved watching someone else navigating along a route. This is supported by another finding, that conditions containing cardinal directions or landmark spatial references did not produce higher route structure recall than the control condition. Since the procedure did not require participants to navigate through a real, or virtual, environment, it may not have been perceived as a disorientation threat. Due to this, they may not have employed wayfinding strategies, accounting for the poor influence of the spatial reference conditions and the lack of sex difference. The study is therefore viewed as an ideal candidate for replication by future investigators, who may wish to compare performance using a task where participants are required to deploy wayfinding strategies.

An urban environment can be abstracted in form of a street network in order to be further analysed structurally. The urban street network can be represented in various ways by taking different principles and constraints into account. Therefore the aim of this work is to investigate human behaviour and communication in emerged urban phenomena, namely traffic flow and wayfinding, by structural characterization of an appropriate representation of an urban street network and modifying the conventional methods. / In order to characterize the depicted urban street network, centrality measure and specifically betweenness centrality is utilized. This analysis is then implemented to characterize the studied urban phenomena with respect to their structural, temporal and dynamic properties. In case of studying only the structural properties of the phenomena such as route description or self localization the conventional betweenness centrality is performed. But in case of studying the dynamic and temporal properties of a phenomenon such as traffic flow a modified version of betweenness centrality is proposed which considers dynamic and temporal aspects of human travel behaviour. / Experiments are designed to test the implementation of the suggested methods in the studied urban phenomena. The results of experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed model in characterization of the studied urban phenomena in this thesis and then mention some of the problems and potential areas for future works.

Airport road access wayfinding refers to a process in which a driver makes a decision to navigate using information support systems in order to arrive to airport successfully. The purpose of this research is to evaluate senior drivers’ behaviour of alternative airport road access designs. In order to evaluate the impact of wayfinding, the combination of simulated driving and completion of a questionnaire were performed. Quantitative data was acquired to give significant results justifying the research outcomes and allow non-biased interpretation of the research results. It represents the process within the development of the methodology and the concept of airport road access design and driving behaviour. Wayfinding complexity varied due to differing levels of road-side furniture. The simulated driving parameters measured were driving mistakes and performances of senior drivers. Three types of driving scenarios were designed consisting of 3.8 miles of airport road access. 40 senior drivers volunteered to undertake these tasks. The questionnaire was used as a supporting study to increase the reliability and validity of the research. Respondents who volunteered for the simulated driving test were encouraged to participate in the questionnaire sessions. The questionnaire was answered after each simulation test was completed. The Mean, Standard Deviation (SD) and Two-Way ANOVA test were used to analyse the results and discussed with reference to the use of the driving simulation. The results confirmed that age group has no significant effect of airport road access complexity design on driving behaviour. Although many studies have been conducted on wayfinding in general, a detailed evaluation on airport road access wayfinding network and driving behaviour in respect of senior drivers were still unexplored domains.

The main intentions of this thesis are to analyse and explain changes in the function and graphic components of Beijing s wayfinding systems and to explain how the systems construct multiple cultural and political identities at different historical periods and in changing local/global contexts. In the thesis, the oversimplified one-way theory of the global-local dichotomy, in which the global power of the West is overwhelming and constantly dominant, and the local system of non-Western countries is passive and fragile, is challenged. Instead, this thesis seeks to examine the interactivity and correlation of the local and the global from two perspectives: mobility and reversibility. Looking at mobility is to consider the local and global and their nexus as different interconnections and networks that are constantly and unevenly changing. Reversibility, with which this thesis is most concerned, deals primarily with the reversible relationship of the local and global, namely, that either the local or the global can be dominant. This point is well illustrated by the evolution of Beijing s graphic wayfinding systems function and appearance. Beijing, as the capital of China, has undergone a radical transformation from the fall of the last Empire Qing (1912) to the establishment of the People s Republic of China (1949). The meaning of Beijing varies in accordance with the changes in its political and social structures. There have been five phases in Beijing s development: a well-planned imperial city; a capital city with a republican spirit; a totally industrialised but relatively isolated capital of a socialist country; an open and modernised Chinese-style socialist city; and a cosmopolitan city. In the course of this metamorphosis, what took place was a series of collisions, exchanges, fusions, and re-collisions between local power and global power. Along with the immense changes in Beijing, the role and appearance of the graphic wayfinding systems have also changed, especially those of road signs and doorplates, whose roles have been transformed from that of initial household register to orientation reference, to effective propaganda tool, and then on to the regeneration of a city. Finally, Beijing s graphic wayfinding design within its urban development has been reconfirmed as a useful instrument to support the new forms of visual narratives and consolidate the city brand of Beijing in the 21st century. This study probes into the political and cultural significances behind the changes of the graphic wayfinding systems of Beijing, as well as the interaction between the local and the global as reflected in the formation of these findings. The mutable and reversible relationship between the local and the global is illustrated and clarified through analysis and comparison of various functions and visual elements between Beijing s present graphic wayfinding systems and its early wayfinding signs, as well as decoding the different mainstream political or cultural ideologies that have deeply affected the function and design of Beijing graphic wayfinding systems at different periods.

Many studies have shown a gender difference in spatial navigation ability, including a related gender difference in global metacognitive self-assessment and spatial anxiety. However, it has yet to be determined whether trial-by-trial metacognitive accuracy differs between the genders and how this may be related to gender differences in navigation performance. The goal of this research was to determine, using the Nelson and Nerens (1990) metamemory framework, if there exist gender differences in trial-by-trial metacognitive monitoring on a first-person virtual maze navigation task, and how this may be related to gender differences in navigation performance. Considering that there is a relatively pervasive stereotype that women have poor navigation stills, an additional goal of this research was to determine if the effects of stereotype could, at least partially, explain the gender difference in navigation performance, confidence, and trial-by-trial metacognitive monitoring accuracy. Many studies have shown stereotype threat and lift to influence confidence and performance between the genders on a variety of spatial cognitive tasks, but mostly on mental rotation tasks. We investigated whether this effect applied to gender differences in a spatial navigation task. In order to accomplish this, we assessed trial-by-trial metacognitive accuracy during a first-person virtual maze navigation task under three stereotype facilitation conditions where participants were told that either: 1) men outperform women on this particular task, 2) women outperform men on this particular task, or 3) the genders perform equally. Over three experiments, the results showed that men generally have more accurate metacognitive monitoring than women, especially when assessing a previous performance. Contrary to our expectations, stereotype activation had no effect on trial-by-trial metacognition, though it did have an effect on navigation performance and confidence.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T16:27:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo2185_1.pdf: 9916625 bytes, checksum: 04c8c0b1abbf828c5503e191a7c1dbe2 (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Esta pesquisa relaciona autonomia e independência de pessoas cegas com o bem estar do indivíduo no meio em que vive. Nesta perspectiva, este estudo foca o indivíduo cego na conquista de sua orientação e aborda a relação usuário - mapa tátil - ambiente construído a partir dos princípios da ergonomia, focada em termos comportamentais de wayfinding , processo de encontrar o caminho (tradução nossa). Trata do reconhecimento das informações ambientais percebidas e verbalizadas durante este processo ao planejar, executar e descrever uma rota não familiar com o objetivo de investigar os elementos referenciais de auxílio à navegação aplicados a projetos de ambientes construídos fechados. Para tal, foram adaptados dois experimentos distintos combinados: o experimento de Passini e Proulx (1988) que trata de questões de wayfinding com pessoas cegas e o experimento de May et al.(2003) que trata de auxílios à navegação de pedestres com visão e sua implicação para o design . O experimento foi realizado no Centro de Educação da Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, UFPE. Os resultados mostraram a problemática do ambiente construído quando este não atende as necessidades de diferentes grupos de usuários

The intention of this document is to explore the potential of lighting design to work as an orientation tool in relatively large-scale buildings, where users lack the environmental clues needed to create effective cognitive maps.Cognitive mapping is the process of mental structuring of an overall image or representation of the spaces and layout of a setting, for the purpose of wayfinding.The motivation of this thesis comes from observing the frustration experienced by students using the KTH Architecture building, documented through an empirical study and interviews.Literature review of human apprehension of spatial evidence that enable individuals to orient in the world is used to define the underlying structure for the design intervention.Understanding human cognition from an existential-phenomenological perspective through the work of Medard Boss and Ludwing Binswanger, together with the technical understanding of the objective fabric of the environment present in wayfinding literature are used to account for the lighting intervention on a studio floor from the KTH Architecture building.The thesis intention is to understand what architectural elements humans use to create a mental map for decision making when moving trough space, and use lighting rather than signage to accentuate, articulate and complement necessary architectural features for the process.

This qualitative study examines the browsing behaviours of patrons at two Swedish public libraries. Our methods were semistructured observations and semistructured interviews. The purpose of this thesis is to generate knowledge on how browsing behaviours manifest in practice, especially in the lesser-studied public library context. The research questions were: 1. Which browsing types and browsing activities can be found in our data? 2. How do the patrons describe the changes in their browsing behaviour in relation to the specificity of their information need? 3. How do the patrons describe that their behaviours and choices are influenced by the libraries’ marketing of resources in the physical library room, for example book displays and themed shelves? The results were then analysed in relation to a typology of browsing behaviour proposed by McKay et al. (2019), and in relation to models of browsing behaviour created by Kwasnik (1992) and Bates (2007). The models by Kwasnik and Bates were found to be accurate and useful in describing the browsing behaviours of the patrons we observed. Our data supported some of the types presented by McKay et al.(2019), while other types have been slightly redefined to better reflect our data. The good enough type was proposed as an alternative to McKay et al.’s satisficing type. The patrons displayed different browsing behaviours corresponding to the specificity of their information needs. The patrons show different views towards the library displays. A few patrons looked at them very rarely, while most looked at them more often.