Finding your way through a building

The architecture researcher Bang-Lee Chang gave people a floor plan and timed them to the stairs. With a plan that was hard to understand, drawn without a first-person view, participants needed 153.82 seconds to reach the closer of the two staircases, which was longer than participants with an easy plan needed to reach the farther one. The questionnaire alongside it split by sex on two measures that have been found before: women recognised the legend better, 31% against 5.3 for men, and men did better on orientation, 25.5% against 7.1. Chang tested the plans as evacuation aids: in an evacuation people take the route they know first, so the wall plan is read under time pressure by people who have never read it before. The full text is not available here and the abstract gives no participant count.

The architectural engineer Janan Ali and Faris Mustafa took space syntax software to seven office buildings in Erbil and set the measurements against what 240 employees said about using the stairs. Connectivity correlated with stair use at 0.710, visibility at 0.697 and accessibility at 0.611, all at p = 0.000. Satisfaction with how the stairs themselves were designed was above 3.5 and had no significant association with using them. Connectivity, visibility and accessibility did, and so did whether anything worth walking to was on the other floors.

The physiologist Zaenal Muttaqien counted people on a staircase in a university building in Yogyakarta before, during and after a signage campaign, taking 93,000 counts from 75 observations of closed-circuit television footage across two buildings, with 28,823 stair uses and 64,177 lift uses on the ground floors. Stair climbing rose 6.7% in the sixth month of the intervention, and the control building did not move. Nothing changed in the third month, and nothing changed at any point for people going down. The signs were designed with the employees who would see them, which Muttaqien puts forward as the reason the effect is larger than the 0.8% median a previous systematic review reports for a motivational sign alone.

The design researcher Tong Bill Xu randomised 49 older adults to ten minutes of active virtual reality training in a digital copy of a real building, ten minutes of passive video or nothing, then set them ten wayfinding tasks in the real building, half practised and half new. On the practised tasks there was no advantage. On the new ones the virtual reality group finished faster than the control group, at a hazard ratio of 1.71 with a confidence interval of 1.08 to 2.70, and travelled less distance, at 2.03. The video group beat the control on distance too. The study was double-blinded, and Xu presents it as a feasibility study.

The psychologist Clément Naveilhan recorded brain activity from electrodes over the scene-selective regions while 28 young and 28 older adults reoriented themselves using objects as landmarks. Older adults performed worse and showed longer latencies in the early cortical markers of visual processing. Making the landmarks smaller, and so the task harder, impaired performance in both age groups, and delayed the P1 component only in the older one.

Ali surveyed 240 people in seven buildings they use every day; no other study here did. Muttaqien counted 93,000 passages without knowing anything about the people making them. Xu worked with 49 participants and Naveilhan with 56 split evenly by age. Chang’s timings come from an on-site experiment whose full text is not available here, so only the figures in the abstract can be given.