Walkplace: On affordances for mobility experiences in the indoor environment
Item
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Title
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Walkplace: On affordances for mobility experiences in the indoor environment
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:6ab507cd31fd:11998
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identifier
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12662
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Creator
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Skorupka, Agnieszka Barbara,
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Contributor
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Gary Winkel
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology | Design | Architecture | Behavioral psychology | affordance | built environment | mobility | movement | participatory design | space syntax
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Abstract
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Walking is among the most common yet important human activities. Encouraging physical activity, particularly walking, has become an objective for promoting public health. In terms of environmental design, research has focused on walkability, that is, the extent to which the built environment supports and encourages walking through its physical features. Although people in modern western societies spend approximately 80 percent of their time inside buildings, most research on the promotion of walking is conducted in urban settings. Meanwhile, research on human movement in indoor settings has mostly focused on wayfinding and its cognitive and behavioral aspects. Wayfinding as a topic has also become dominant in the discourse on movement in environmental psychology while generating few design applications. I argue that while navigation and wayfinding are everyday activities, they are not necessarily nor the only ways that people move around environments and that an empirical focus on only these aspects of movement limits design possibilities. This study addresses the aforementioned limitations by identifying environmental qualities (i.e., affordances) that influence the everyday experience of movement in indoor architectural settings. I employ triangulated methods drawing on phenomenologically oriented ethnographies, space syntax, and participatory design. The group of study participants (n=24 for the ethnography, and n=9 for the participatory design) were selected to include a very diverse group of users to allow for identifying a multiplicity of experiences. The study sites included three buildings located at one university campus representing three very different architectural styles with each designed and built in a different decade and an additional building that was being designed and later constructed at the time of data collection. The findings of affordances coupled with mobility experiences presented in this dissertation are translated into patterns for mobility design. Moreover, I put the findings in the broader context of the environmental psychology, in particular the theory of environmental preference and learned helplessness. My work contributes to the theories of place as well as providing critical assessment of the methods used.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
