The Effect of the Running‐Man Emergency Exit Sign and Its Installed Location on Human Directional Choice

Abstract

Understanding the meaning of an emergency exit sign is essential for escaping from a building during a disaster. According to International Organization for Standardization 7010:2011, there are leftward and rightward running-man exit signs indicating the location of an exit door. However, there is neither an application rule regarding which direction the sign should point nor a rule for where it should be attached in the horizontal dimension. We examined the effect of the heading direction of the running man and its horizontal locations on the selection of exit directions. A modified spatial Stroop task as an unforced-choice task was designed by combining the running man's heading direction and its horizontal location. The results showed both facilitation and inhibition effects, conflict adaptation, and post-error slowing reflecting top-down control. These findings suggest that the heading direction of the running-man exit sign includes evident directionality. This should be considered in designing and establishing standardized emergency exit signs.

The effect of technical installations on evacuation performance in urban road tunnel fires

“…Research into technical assistant systems has demonstrated that they provide help during the early stages of evacuations through early warnings of danger, providing instructions for decision-making, and guiding evacuees to exit affected tunnel (Kim et al, 2016, Olander et al, 2017, Kinateder et al, 2019. For example, Heskestad (1999) reanalysed a Norwegian experiment and discovered that low location lighting provided correct decision-making between 70% and 80% regardless of whether it was electrically powered or photo luminescent.…”

Fire evacuation supported by centralized and decentralized visual guidance systems

“…Other researchers have used sensors to detect the locations 61 of fires and indicate a safe route using blinking signs (Yenumula et al, 62 2015). In addition, the traditional exit sign icon (i.e., a running person) may be oriented and located towards the direction of the optimal exit route in order to guide evacuations (Kim et al, 2016). Here, various designs for indicating incorrect or inefficient directions have also been tested.…”

Smart Design for Evacuation Signage Layout for Exhibition Halls in Exhibition Buildings Based on Visibility

“…Based on visibility, this paper introduces a smart evacuation signage layout design method that can be adapted to different booth layout forms in the exhibition Evacuation signage plays the role of conveying evacuation guidance information in the exhibition space, and its effectiveness is influenced by both sign visibility and content readability. Currently, the legislation, standards, and related studies, such as the Design Code for Exhibition Building (JGJ 218-2010) and the Code for Fire Protection Design of Buildings (GB50016-2014), have primarily focused on sign text [10], graphics [11,12], color [13,14], size [15], brightness characteristics [16,17], and smart evacuation guidance systems [18,19] to solve the problem of the readability of evacuation signage, but not much research has been devoted to whether evacuation signage can be "seen". In practice, many evacuation signs are often set up formally, blindly, and arbitrarily, ignoring the relationship between booth layout and the visibility range of evacuation signage in the three-dimensional space.…”