Structuring Space with Image Schemata: Wayfinding in Airports as a Case Study

Wayfinding is a basic activity people do throughout their entire lives as they navigate from one place to another. In order to create different spaces in such a way that they facilitate people’s wayfinding it is necessary to integrate principles of human spatial cognition into the design process. This paper presents a methodology to structure space based on experiental patterns, called image schemata. It integrates cognitive and engineering aspects in three steps: (1) interviewing people about their spatial experiences as they perform a wayfinding task in the application space, (2) extracting the image schemata from these interviews and formulating a sequence of subtasks, and (3) structuring the application space (i.e., the wayfinding task) with the extracted image schemata. We use wayfinding in airports as a case study to demonstrate the methodology. Our observations show that most often image schemata are correlated with other image schemata in the form of image-schematic blocks and rarely occur in isolation. Such image-schematic blocks serve as a knowledge-representation scheme for wayfinding tasks.