Investigating Effective Wayfinding in Airports: A Bayesian Network Approach

Abstract

Effective wayfinding is the successful interplay of human and environmental factors resulting in a person successfully moving from their current position to a desired location in a timely manner. To date this process has not been modelled to reflect this interplay. This paper proposes a complex modelling system approach of wayfinding by using Bayesian Networks to model this process, and applies the model to airports. The model suggests that human factors have a greater impact on effective wayfinding in airports than environmental factors. The greatest influences on human factors are found to be the level of spatial anxiety experienced by travellers and their cognitive and spatial skills. The model also predicted that the navigation pathway that a traveller must traverse has a larger impact on the effectiveness of an airport's environment in promoting effective wayfinding than the terminal design.

Exploring an Absent Presence: Wayfinding as an Embodied Sociocultural Experience

“…Communication is present in Farr et al's (2014) model, but in our model we connect it to society in wider sense.…”

“…Wayfinders and stakeholders are the players who interact in the social field. Embodied agents employ and are influenced by their own bodies, feelings, perceptions, emotions, senses (such as in the examples of safe and anxious bodies and pleasure seeking bodies), cognitive and spatial skills (as highlighted by Farr et al [2014]) and history. History in the form of previous experiences is important in embodying wayfinding, as it encourages a focus not only on the journey through a given space, but also through time before, during and after the actual corporeal movement through that space.…”

“…This cognitive journey through time, in the planning and construction of the journey, evokes emotions drawn from previous wayfinding experiences and projected to future experiences, such as wishing to re-create a good experience, avoid a bad one or indeed seek out a new one. In our model, however, history is not only limited to the previous experiences of a place, as in Farr et al's (2014) model, but it also extends to agents' embodied 'habitus', or wayfinding habitus.…”

“…These elements, in Farr et al's (2014) model were categorised under different groups (for example, the web, maps and signs under communication, built elements under environmental factors). We include them in the same category as they are all elements that are external to the embodied agents, but that are socioculturally influenced and/or perceived.…”

“…We cannot therefore ignore these 'other' bodies, as they help, hinder us and define the wayfinder. In short, there is no avoiding the process and outcome of interpersonal communication, given the crowds who wayfind in the same spaces, those who are often asked for directions (Chebat et al 2005;Farr et al 2014) and those who lead and guide wayfinders (sometimes astray). In short, wayfinding can be considered a 'somatic mode of attention', which Csordas (1993: 138) defines as 'culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one's body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others'.…”