Considering Affective Responses towards Environments for Enhancing Location Based Services

Abstract

A number of studies in the field of environmental psychology show that humans perceive and evaluate their surroundings affectively. Some places are experienced as unsafe, while some others as attractive and interesting. Experiences from daily life show that many of our daily behaviours and decision-making are often influenced by this kind of affective responses towards environments. Location based services (LBS) are often designed to assist and support people's behaviours and decision-making in space. In order to provide services with high usefulness (usability and utility), LBS should consider these kinds of affective responses towards environments. This paper reports on the results of a research project, which studies how people's affective responses towards environments can be modelled and acquired, as well as how LBS can benefit by considering these affective responses. As one of the most popular LBS applications, mobile pedestrian navigation systems are used as an example for illustration.

Mapping citizens’ emotions: participatory planning support system in Olomouc, Czech Republic

“…Emotional mapping can be traced back to the ground-breaking book by Nold (2009) Emotional Cartography, but the concept has been theorised on many levels since he wrote his book. Three conceptual frameworks of emotional data collection have been defined by Griffin and Mcquoid (2012), and emotional maps have been used in various fields, such as tourism (Mody, Willis, & Kerstein, 2009), navigation (Gartner, 2012;Huang, Gartner, Klettner, & Schmidt, 2014), city planning Raslan, Al-hagla, & Bakr, 2014), biking infrastructure research (Lawson, Pakrashi, Ghosh, & Szeto, 2013;Møller & Hels, 2008;Pánek & Benediktsson, 2017;Reddy et al, 2010), safety mapping (Lipscomb, 2014;Pánek, Pászto, & Marek, 2017;Traunmueller, Marshall, & Capra, 2015), and in combination with the data mining of social networks (Biever, 2010;Caragea, Squicciarini, Stehle, Neppalli, & Tapia, 2014;Hauthal & Burghardt, 2016).…”

Difficulties and Problem-Solving Strategies in Wayfinding Among Adults With Cognitive Disabilities: A Look at the Bigger Picture

“…This would make the aid more relevant to the needs and actual problem-solving strategies of people with cognitive disabilities. Finally, in addition to landmark-based information, considering the negative subjective experience and emotions felt by people with cognitive disabilities, our results are in favor of the use of positive emotions-inducing landmarks in adapted navigational aids, as recommended by several authors, to support a better memorization of spatial information (Gartner, 2012;Huang et al, 2014;Ruotolo et al, 2019).…”

“…Emotion has also been shown to affect spatial representations: participants who see landmarks inducing positive emotions while walking along a virtual route are able to locate the landmarks more accurately on a map afterward, as well as drawing the route, in comparison to participants who see landmarks inducing negative emotions (Ruotolo et al, 2019). These findings have led some researchers to advocate the use of positive emotion to improve wayfinding apps in everyday life, for example by computing instructions and routes based on street segments previously evaluated positively by users to allow for an "emotional" wayfinding (Gartner, 2012;Huang et al, 2014). Our results suggest that people with cognitive disabilities, who tend to experience mostly negative emotions when facing an unexpected situation, could also benefit from such a navigational aid proposing routes inducing positive emotions and therefore enhancing spatial working memory and "emotional" wayfinding.…”

Crowdsourcing geo-information on landscape perceptions and preferences: A review

“…Most of the studies were in the latter category describing the use of crowdsourcing to capture the perception and emotional responses in relation to landscapes (e.g. Huang et al, 2014;Klettner, Huang, Schmidt, & Gartner, 2013), and to assess landscape preferences and cultural ecosystem services associated with landscapes on different spatial scales, ranging from local to continental (Casalegno et al, 2013;Dunkel, 2015;Tenerelli et al, 2016;van Zanten et al, 2016). Application focus studies in this review either describe (the use of geo-spatial data obtained through) active crowdsourcing projects (Section 2.2) or research projects that harness passively crowdsourced geo-information (Section 2.3).…”

“…Finally, EmoMap, a two-years long project, which ended in 2013 gathering 3200 observations from 193 participants, also involved a mobile app where users were asked to rate the experienced levels of comfort, safety, diversity, attractiveness and relaxation in their environment, and record contextual information such as familiarity with the place and company (Klettner et al, 2013). The collected data was subsequently used to enhance route-planning services (Huang et al, 2014).…”