A User Centric Study of Wayfinding Behavior in Indian Urban Fabric

Abstract

The modern tools of urban design require the elements of an urban form in quantitative forms since these tools essentially take a parametric approach towards urban design. While some of the elements of urban form such as climate, transportation etc. are inherently quantitative in nature, the same is not true for the elements that are dependent on human factors such as cognitive abilities and behavioral pattern. Wayfinding behavior, an important element of this nature, is the focus of the current work. Wayfinding can be defined as a participant’s ability to reach a destination within a specific time and take the best possible route. Typically, wayfinding behavior is influenced by several human and environmental factors. In the past, many works have been presented in order to understand a person's wayfinding behavior and how different factors influence this element. Most of these works involved experiments and post-experiment surveys and dealt with the cognitive abilities of the users and how different environmental factors affect these abilities. Naturally, the outcomes of these experiments were mostly qualitative in nature. With the recent advances in computational science, different mathematical and quantitative models have been developed to overcome this issue. In this work, we take advantage of recent advances in establishing mental maps through eye-tracking experiments. An eye-tracking experiment generates a heatmap by tracking eye movements when an object is viewed and thus, post-processing of these experimental data makes it possible to directly draw conclusions about the participant’s cognitive behavior. Although eye tracking experiments are gaining significant momentum in wayfinding research worldwide, only a few works have been carried out in the Indian context at a larger scale such as at a city level. This dissertation is primarily devoted to bridging that research gap. The research experiment has evolved through three segments, as depicted in figure 1. Wayfinding Parameter and Scenario generation— and First segment, as described in chapter 3, is conducted to identify the salient or key factor of wayfinding in an urban fabric. After creating a comprehensive list of wayfinding parameter in an urban fabric Quality Function Deployment (OFD) matrix is employed to identify the key factor of wayfinding, which is found to be pathway. Now based on this parameter various scenarios are generated. iii Multivariate Scenarios—Scenarios of traditional real world cases with organic as well as grid iron pathways are used for onsite observation, whereas the modern multivariate scenarios are used to validate the findings from the observation cases. The modern multivariate scenarios are generated from a real world example of grid-iron urban fabric. Generated multivariate scenarios are of other variation of pathways-i.e. ring radial and organic. Virtual testing is done after the real world test as validation of the study, as in virtual setup impacts of other parameters can be nullified. The generated multivariate scenarios have all the parameters same across the scenarios except pathway pattern. Next, two morphologically similar Indian cities, Jodhpur and Jaipur, were selected to understand the factors that influence the wayfinding behavior in Indian context. It was found that the structured layout of the city of Jaipur helps the user in wayfinding as compared to the more organic layout of Jodhpur. In addition, the lesser visual permeability and lack of signage adds to the difficulty in wayfinding in Jodhpur. These factors and their influences are in agreement with the experimental results conducted in other cities. Interestingly, these experiments show that live attributes in the city of Jodhpur such as public interactions and events greatly help participants in wayfinding. Since the aim of these experiments is to generate numerical quantities that could be incorporated into urban design, an attempt was made in that direction for the next half of this dissertation. For this purpose, different virtual scenarios were generated with different variables and eye-tracking experiments were conducted in these scenarios. Since pathways perform well in the quality function deployment (QFD) matrix, it acts as the most significant factor as compared to the others. This hypothesis was corroborated by the designed experiment and post-experiment activities such as map sketching, locating points in a map etc. Finally, an urban design involving these factors was illustrated. For this design, the parameters were identified according to the design requirements and these parameters were quantified based on established rules on geometrical systems and mathematical models. A generative, automated algorithm was proposed for an urban design that takes all these factors into account. With this research work, a qualitative element of urban form was quantified in the Indian context and incorporated into a proposed urban design. This urban design is particularly effective since it significantly improves the residents’ wayfinding as well as overall living experiences.