The architectural spaces and Their psychological impacts

National Conference on Cognitive Research on Human Perception of Built Environment for Health and Wellbeing On 09th & 10th February, 2012, Vishakhapatnam, India The architectural spaces and Their psychological impacts Jatish Bag, Reader, Dignity College of architecture, Anjora, Durg Chhattisgarh, www.dignitycollege.com, Email ID – [email protected] ABSTRACT We all require spatial knowledge of our environment. Many people spend the better part of their day in a built environment, and therefore, much of their thought about space is directly intertwined with the architectural and urban form of their surroundings. How does the form of people’s surroundings affect their spatial knowledge? The intention of this paper is to create a link between human spatial cognition research and architectural design through review of three major research articles and some supporting papers. An empirical study was conducted with human subjects in complex multi-level architectural designs and thinking aloud protocols and thought for performance measures of experienced and inexperienced participants in different way finding tasks were compared. Spatial cognition and way finding research as well as design cognition are well established as fields of research. It is nevertheless largely unknown how architects reason when they try to integrate way-finding-friendly factors into their designs. In two semi-structured interviews architects were asked to give critique on real world example cases as well as to solve predefined design tasks [1]. The qualitative analysis focuses on perspective taking and other skills related to the anticipation of users in the building. The main finding is that the anticipation of visual access for single locations is done well but that multiple locations are seldom considered. A consequence would be that anticipation of users' perspective is restricted to episode-like cognitive walk-through [2]. Spatial cognition concerns the study of knowledge and beliefs about spatial properties of objects and events in the world. Cognition is about knowledge: its acquisition, storage and retrieval, manipulation, and use by humans, nonhuman animals, and intelligent machines. Broadly construed, cognitive systems include sensation and perception, thinking, imagery, memory, learning, language, reasoning, and problem solving [3]. In humans, cognitive structures and processes are part of the mind, which emerges from a brain and nervous system in side of a 1 National Conference on Cognitive Research on Human Perception of Built Environment for Health and Wellbeing On 09th & 10th February, 2012, Vishakhapatnam, India body that exists in a social and physical world. Spatial properties include location, size, distance, direction, separation and connection, shape, pattern, and movement. Key words: spatial cognition, qualitative analysis, architectural techniques 1. Introduction: We all require spatial knowledge of our environment in order to travel to the grocery store and back, in order to answer such questions as “Which is further west?”, and in order to provide route directions to visitors for going out of town. How we acquire, store, and use this knowledge is of central interest to the field of spatial cognition. Many people spend the better part of their day in a built environment, i.e. the urban world (with varying density) of buildings, streets, parks, parking lots, blocks, and squares that has been designed and constructed by humans. Therefore, much of their thought about space (spatial judgment and memory) and movement through space (way finding) is directly intertwined with the architectural and urban form of their surroundings [4]. How does the form of people’s urban surroundings affect their spatial knowledge of those places? In particular, how does urban form affect spatial judgment and memory? These questions, as well as the subject matter of spatial cognition more generally, are intimately connected with a number of other topics of study in the field of cognitive science. Spatial knowledge is commonly acquired through first-hand experience with an environment or through use of representations of that environment, such as maps. Taking in and perceiving this external information necessarily involves perception (usually visual or auditory). Moreover, in the case of first-hand experience, one’s body acts in and moves through the surrounding environment. Thus, issues of embodied/embedded action and cognition arise in the study of spatial cognition. Here focus is given specifically on the interplay of urban form with spatial judgment and memory. The term cognitive map effectively refers to the mental representations that store a person’s spatial knowledge of an environment. However, the term is notoriously ambiguous – the form it takes on differs from theory to theory. Cognitive maps may be considered to be actual metric maps, map-like in form, acting like maps in practice, or convenient fictions [5]. For the purposes of this study, which focuses on performance in spatial judgment and memory tasks, the 2 National Conference on Cognitive Research on Human Perception of Built Environment for Health and Wellbeing On 09th & 10th February, 2012, Vishakhapatnam, India last view was adopted and simply considered a cognitive map to be one’s spatial knowledge of an environment. According to this perspective, a cognitive map is shaped by a number of different processes that do not necessarily follow the constraints of physical maps. Just as with most other processes of human thought, spatial cognition involves the use of heuristics. Tversky identified a set of basic heuristics that are used to encode and store memory of environments and maps, as well as of meaningless visual forms. “Remembering the absolute location of figures is difficult, and is facilitated by remembering locations relative to other figures and/or relative to the natural directions of the figure”. This simplification process is revealed in systematic errors, which Tversky attributes “to two heuristics that are derived from principles of figures that are perceived as grouped together but are misaligned, that is, offset in one spatial dimension, are remembered as more aligned than they really are.” The rotation heuristic assumes that “figures are remembered with respect to a frame of reference [e.g. north-south, east-west], and that, when the orientation of the frame of reference and the natural orientation of the figure conflict, the figure’s orientation will be remembered as closer to that of the frame of reference”. Note the connection to perceptual processes: rotation “is similar to the Gestalt organizing principle of common fate” and alignment “is related to grouping by proximity”. These heuristics have been demonstrated to apply to the spatial judgment and memory of large-scale spaces, such as continents, more local spaces such as streets, and both real and artificial spaces that are learned through graphical representations like maps [6]. 2. Building environmental features and way finding strategies What are the environmental features that can lead to navigation breakdowns? A pioneering study on indoor navigation was conducted and identified fundamental aspects of a building’s route network, like choice points, directional changes and distances as relevant predictors of way finding difficulties in complex buildings. Numerous studies, especially in the environmental psychology community, have since investigated the reasons for way finding difficulties. For instance, identifies four general classes of environmental variables that shape way finding situations: visual access, the degree of architectural differentiation, the use of signs and room numbers, and floor plan configuration. Further studies pointed to the impact of layout complexity on both way finding performance and cognitive mapping, recent studies have been conducted in 3 National Conference on Cognitive Research on Human Perception of Built Environment for Health and Wellbeing On 09th & 10th February, 2012, Vishakhapatnam, India airports shopping malls and universities. Another essential point seems to be the familiarity with the building. Point out that familiarity with a building has substantial impact on way finding performance. So does visual access within the building: If large parts of the building are immediately visible and mutual indivisibility (vistas) connects the parts of the building, people have to rely less on stored spatial knowledge and can rely on information directly available in their field of vision. A disadvantage of these lines of research is that floor plan complexity and configuration as well as visual access have been defined rather informally in the literature discussed above The Space Syntax movement has introduced formalized, graph-based accounts of layout configurations into architectural analysis. Calculations based on these representations express the connective structure of rooms and circulation areas in a building and are strongly associated with route choices of hospital visitors both in unguided exploration and in directed search tasks way finding behavior, Yet research along this methodology is generally based on correlations of building layout and aggregate movement patterns, thus providing no immediate understanding of individual cognitive processes [5]. One drawback of almost all controlled studies into Way finding performance and building complexity is that they have limited themselves to investigating movement and orientation in the horizontal plane of isolated floor levels .Some scientist Observed way finding performance in tasks involving vertical level changes. They found people losing their orientation due to vertical travel, supporting more informal results, identified another challenge of multilevel buildings: Way finders assume that the topology of the floor plans of different levels is identical, an assumption that can lead to severe way finding difficulties. In later chapters of the paper we provide a building analysis revealing that our setting could be similarly prone to challenges based on multi-level properties. Therefore, our investigations into both the navigation performance of test participants as well as their mental processes explicitly focus on the abovementioned aspects. Although not investigating way finding behavior directly, present evidence that humans have trouble correctly aligning vertical spaces in pointing tasks. We also expect way finders to have trouble integrating survey knowledge of different floors. Properly connecting mental floor plans at transition points like staircases or elevators may also be further impaired by difficulties of maintaining one’s heading due to the rapid direction changes involved in stair 4 National Conference on Cognitive Research on Human Perception of Built Environment for Health and Wellbeing On 09th & 10th February, 2012, Vishakhapatnam, India climbing. Many architects have analyzed way finding strategies as to what degree they rely on different types of knowledge. Spatial knowledge is commonly distinguished into three levels. In the context of this study it can be assumed that finding destinations inside the building requires all three types of spatial knowledge: landmarks identify one’s own position and relevant navigational choice points, route knowledge connects distinguishable landmarks, while survey knowledge integrates routes and guides high-level decisions for route selection and general direction. Pazzaglia found evidence that people differ in their general preference for relying on different types of spatial knowledge, especially landmarks vs. survey knowledge. It implies that people’s way finding strategies gradually progress from route-based orientation to survey-based strategies, yet could not clearly tie this evolution to a performance improvement [4]. Yet it has become clear in recent years that strict developmental stages from landmark, to route and then survey knowledge are not realistic and that the representations rather develop in parallel, so that navigators can build up initial survey representations early on. In a building with a complex network like in our study, the general notion of survey knowledge—in the sense of correct positional information about the metric spatial position of destinations—representing the most advanced and valuable information may not hold. In fact, knowing the routes through the maze of levels and vertical and horizontal corridors can be even more important, especially since seemingly direct routes may be blocked by dead-ends in the building, an aspect not taken into account by direction-based navigation planning. A number of different way finding strategies have been described for two-dimensional (outdoor) settings. People try to minimize their global deviation from the direction of the goal position, and at the same time avoid local direction deviations at junctions, thus maintaining a straight heading wherever possible. The environment is cognitively segmented into regions which guide navigation decisions. But how do people incorporate their available knowledge in way finding strategies in the three-dimensional case of multi-level buildings? Here down below three strategies were referred where roughly some thumb rules were adopted for way finding techniques . Distinction of three strategies were proposed for finding one’s way, even in cases when the way finder does not have fully developed knowledge about the spatial setting: 5 National Conference on Cognitive Research on Human Perception of Built Environment for Health and Wellbeing On 09th & 10th February, 2012, Vishakhapatnam, India 1. The central point strategy of finding one’s way by sticking as much as possible to well-known parts of the building, like the main entry hall and main connecting corridors, even if this requires considerable detours. 2. The direction strategy of choosing routes that head towards and lead to the horizontal position of the goal as directly as possible, irrespective of level-changes. 3. The floor strategy of first finding one’s way to the floor of the destination, irrespective of the horizontal position of the goal. Mapping these strategies to other accounts, the least angle strategies can be directly related to the direction strategy in our classification. In a more abstract sense, the region-based ‘‘fine-to-coarse’’ strategy of—ceteris paribus—preferring paths that quickly bring one into the region of a destination, is compatible with the floor strategy, if you assume floor levels were as organizing principles in the mental representation of multi-level buildings The idea of a route skeleton corresponds to the central-point strategy. Kuipers showed that over time, human as well as artificial navigators learn a set of central paths (‘the skeleton’) in an environment [7]. This centrality can be predicted based on the number of boundary relations involved in its segments, but we can also assume that architects mark certain paths as central by architectural features like entries or ornamentation. Also, the notion of a frame of reference which relates to the main orientation of an environment unless sticking to the orientation the environment was initially experienced might be interpreted in the sense of a central point strategy. The main corridors correspond to main orientation of the building and they are the first parts of the building to be experienced. If the whole building is encoded with respect to this reference frame as proposed by McNamara, using theses corridors like in the central point strategy should be easier for participants. Yet it is not a priori clear whether or not a reliance on central points and paths will have more positive or negative impact on navigation performance, especially in our setting. The application of the strategies defined above clearly requires access to information about the building. With an environment as complex as the building in our setting, the relevant types of knowledge can become quite intertwined. To address this, we look into the knowledge 6 National Conference on Cognitive Research on Human Perception of Built Environment for Health and Wellbeing On 09th & 10th February, 2012, Vishakhapatnam, India requirements can be looked from three perspectives: First, the overall familiarity of the way finders with the building is controlled for by comparing a group of visitors unfamiliar with the building to a group of repeat visitors. Second, survey knowledge about the building is identified for each participant in a pointing task. And third, in a self report measure of environmental ability the competence to build up environmental knowledge is assessed. This design, combined with verbal reports and task performance measures, will allow us to address the following. Research questions as well as methodological concerns: 1. Which strategies do way finders employ for navigating in the third dimension 2. How does familiarity with the building affect performance and the choice of navigation strategies? 3. What is the role of survey knowledge for multi-level way finding performance? 4. Which cognitive processes can be identified in verbal reports of way finding tasks and how do they relate to performance? 3. Cognitive analysis: Architecture deals with the design, construction and conceptualization of built space. It greatly influences the comprehension and knowledge of orientation and navigation systems. Architect aims to construct buildings as complex systems of numerous architectural dimensions. To develop an adequate and satisfactory compromise is an essentially spatial task. Architectural space is not generated on a blank sheet, but constantly in respect to the present environment and consequently in a high-dimensional decision space. More than 40 years ago Le Corbusier emphasized the idea of movement as a central theme in the theory of architectural design [8]. As agreed by the architects that the perception of a built environment must be described as a dynamic process of movement caused by the fact that we do not experience the spatial layout of a building as a static structure. We discover architectural shapes and layouts literally step-bystep. Thus, from a user’s perspective several points of environmental ability, legibility and image ability are essential to understand and interpret building layouts, e.g., landmarks, routes, paths and walkways, and to differentiate shapes and forms, configured space and building topology, and the close relation between inside and outside space. ‘‘The idea or image of a building is as 7 National Conference on Cognitive Research on Human Perception of Built Environment for Health and Wellbeing On 09th & 10th February, 2012, Vishakhapatnam, India important as the building itself’’ characterized as the connection between architectural space and its mental image [9]. Understanding a building from it’s inside structure and spatial organization requires making one’s way through the building. Thus, in theories of building design, the idea of architectural experience and the meanings of walkways have a very close relationship. From a Space Syntax’s point of view walkways seems to be the most fundamental aspect of architectural space, not only for investigating pedestrian movement in designed environments but also for general exploring, discovering and learning about architectural settings. In order to provide useful spatial points of reference, the differentiation and discrimination of shapes is the most central property in planning an architectural setting. Although symmetry and similarity are very well-known features in the history of architecture, they contrast with the indispensable need of distinguishing multi-faceted environments. Symmetrical architectural settings are principally one of the foremost difficulties in spatial problem-solving processes. Yet, they can be helpful in interpreting vertical information of space, e.g., for spatial reasoning within multi-level buildings. Overall, it is believed that the functional dilemma of the building for way finding is prominently caused by the problematic arrangement of complex decision points, their linking paths, the position and design of stairways, vertical incongruence of floors, incomprehensible signage, and too few possibilities for monitoring interior and exterior landmarks. Consequently, the building as a whole gives the impression of a three-dimensional maze. In the following, some major parts of the building were focused and describe their disadvantages from a cognitivearchitectural point of view. 4. Major cognitive spaces in architectural design 4.1 Staircases: Here lies the main disadvantage of the building. In architecture, a stairway should serve as visual focus and spatial connector. In general, stairways should help integrating vertical information while exploring multilevel buildings and they should ease experiencing the layout spatially with respect to the building as a whole. Stairways are architectural design elements in their own right and not just technical components of the building for going up or 8 National Conference on Cognitive Research on Human Perception of Built Environment for Health and Wellbeing On 09th & 10th February, 2012, Vishakhapatnam, India down. They function as a significant circulation node as well as a vertical interconnection between different levels of the building and thus enable the movement flow between the levels of the building. During vertical motion, well-designed stairways can provide access to various perspectives of the interior organization of the building and thus facilitate its legibility. Also, investing time into the design of stairways has yet another facet: Individual floor plans may be readily changed to suit specific tenant requirements, but the facilities for pedestrian circulation between the floors in the building are fixed. Vertical circulation is one of the most important aspects of good building design in architecture. So, when planning the design of staircases architects generally have to take into account two key design parameters. First the constructional and representational form of its appearance have to be highlighted with respect to the function of the building and second the position of the stairway has to be optimized in relation to the user’ s activity within the layout. Ideally, stairways of a building represent its functional framework and accordingly, architects speak about the spatial nerve tract of the building. Users do not readily perceive a main stairway to the upper floors. Using the foremost stairway (near the entrance), there are a lot of spatial twists and turns without an opportunity for controlling one’s location. This deficit is at least partly due to the complete lack of visual access to the outside, which would help to improve spatial updating. Additionally, the number of rotations within the stairway plays a great role for the user’s stability of his cognitive map of the building. Taken together, the analyses revealed that—except for global building characteristics— the staircases are the single most clearly identified cause of way finding problems in our contemporary building setting. 4.2 Entrance and survey decks: The entrance hall is indiscernible. For public buildings the entrance hall symbolizes the most important point in the layout. The essential function of the entrance hall is to be readable as such and to cognitively structure the route network, especially for unfamiliar visitors, who clearly rely on central-point-based strategies, as we have discussed earlier. However, this function is not properly met, which imposes a usability deficit on the building as a whole. For the user entering the entrance hall, within complex spatial settings architects and designers have to create places of survey and overview to allow users to build 9 National Conference on Cognitive Research on Human Perception of Built Environment for Health and Wellbeing On 09th & 10th February, 2012, Vishakhapatnam, India well-integrated spatial knowledge. Visibility is one of the most important qualities of architectural spaces and consequently fundamental to the general understanding of built environments [9]. 4.3 Floor space and dead ends: The layout of the floors is incongruent. In the planning of complex buildings architects have to pay attention to the uncomplicated and insightful organization of floors. From way finding research and a building usability point of view, this (a) prompts improper assumptions in the users about the route networks and (b) hampers the mental alignment of levels. Dead ends make way finding difficult. It is very important in architecture and particularly for public buildings such as universities, hospitals or conference centers to pay attention to always provide an alternative route to any navigational decision. Dead ends block the user’s exploration activity and are extremely difficult to operate within the mental representation of the building in respect to the levels above and vertical information in general. But there are several locations that can be characterized as ‘‘dead space’’, ‘‘dead ends’’ or ‘‘blind alleys’’. For example, the public area surrounded by the living quarters leads to a dark and uncomfortable corridor. Users will not expect the stairways at the end of the corridor and thus miss relevant route choices and feel lost in dead ends. 4.4 Transitional spaces and building interiors: The interior building structure is not distinguishable. To understand a building layout both the exterior and the interior structure of a public building has to be effortlessly understood. Looking at the floor plan, the dissimilarity of geometrical shapes and architectural forms would appear to be helpful for the users to orientate themselves. But in fact, when actually navigating in the building, the different subsections are no longer readily recognizable for the way finder, leading to a lack of visual differentiation. There is too little differentiation of public and private space. When planning multi-functional public buildings architects have to bear in mind to separate private or personal space from public space. This rule serves the purpose of integrating two disparate spatial systems within one building. There are a lot of mistaken public and private areas within the conference center, which results in disorientating the user and the production of unnecessary dead ends. Therefore, public spaces have to be clearly indicated both by architectural layout and signage. 10 National Conference on Cognitive Research on Human Perception of Built Environment for Health and Wellbeing On 09th & 10th February, 2012, Vishakhapatnam, India 5. Discussion and future scope Providing guidelines for improving way finding friendliness and usability is clearly a practical goal of our research. We will also need to check whether the results of our study generalize to buildings with less complicated layouts across floors. It remains to be tested in subsequent studies, how the 3D navigation strategies are related to the important theoretical concept of ‘‘frame of reference’’ have provided a basis with their identification of local mismatches of reference frames in a building and this should be extended to the multi-level case [10]. Based on the present study we hope to intensify the cooperation of cognitive scientists and architectural designers. In the future, we will develop specific methods to support usability from the early planning stages on, in order to avoid costly design mistakes. Besides using virtual reality techniques for testing layout prototypes, we envision augmenting Space-Syntax-type layout analysis with the techniques presented here to identify usability deficits. Our study has demonstrated the general usefulness of verbal data for systematic statistical analyses of cognitive processes in way finding at least if they are combined with objective way finding measures. Helping to understand the cognitive strategies of building users is a valuable contribution of cognitive science to architectural planning. References [1]. Smelser N.J., Balter P.B.,(2001) International Encyclopedia of the social and behavioral science, pp-14771-14775, Oxford pergamon press. [2]. George Vrachliotis, Christoph Holscher, Tobias Meilinger, (2007), Building Analysis from a Spatial Cognition Perspective, ETH Zurich, Faculty of Architecture, University of Freiburg, Centre for Cognitive Science, Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics [3]. Drew Dara-Abrams,(2005), Architecture of Mind and World: How Urban Form Influences Spatial Cognition, Carleton College, Digital Commons @ Carleton College. [http://digitalcommons.carleton.edu/cscp/2], accessed on 26.12.2011 11 National Conference on Cognitive Research on Human Perception of Built Environment for Health and Wellbeing On 09th & 10th February, 2012, Vishakhapatnam, India [4]. 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