Wayfinding: Affordances and Agent Simulation

SYNONYMS Wayfinding behavior; DEFINITION Wayfinding behavior is the purposeful, directed, and motivated movement from an origin to a specific distant destination that cannot be directly perceived by the traveler. It involves interaction between the wayfinder and the environment. Affordances are a concept from ecological psychology based on the paradigm of direct perception. They are specific combinations of the properties of substances and surfaces taken with reference to an observer. These invariant compounds are specified in ambient light—which is the result of illumination—and detected as units. Ambient light has structure and therefore information. Agent simulation is a technique of imitating the behavior of some situation or process involving one or many agents. An agent is anything that can perceive its environment through sensors and act upon it through effectors. Agents are situated in some environment and capable of autonomous action. Kevin Lynch's [1] " The Image of the City " is the first documentation of human wayfinding research in the literature. His goal was to develop a method for the evaluation of city form based on the concept of imageability, and to offer principles for city design. As part of the interviews people had to perform mental trips across their cities, describing the sequence of things and landmarks they would see along the way. Based on his investigations Lynch divided the contents of the city images into five classes: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. These elements were described as the building blocks in the process of making firm, differentiated structures at the urban scale and have been the basis for later wayfinding research.