The Floor Strategy: Wayfinding Cognition in a Multi-Level Building

This short paper is concerned with strategies and cognitive processes of wayfinding in public buildings. We conducted an empirical study in a complex multi-level building, comparing performance measures of experienced and inexperienced participants in different wayfinding tasks. Thinking aloud protocols provided insights into navigation strategies, planning phases, use of landmarks and signage. Three specific strategies for navigation in multi-level buildings were compared. The cognitively efficient floor strategy was preferred by experts over a central-point strategy or a direction strategy, and overall was associated to better wayfinding performance. Wayfinding in three-dimensional structures Many people have problems finding their way around public buildings such as airports, hospitals, or university buildings. We aim to identify how human wayfinding strategies and background knowledge foster navigation in a complex multi-level setting. Almost all controlled studies into wayfinding performance and building complexity have limited themselves to investigating movement and orientation in the horizontal plane of isolated floor levels. Soeda, Kushiyama and Ohno (1997) observed wayfinding performance in tasks involving vertical level changes. They found that a) people loose their orientation due to vertical travel and b) – often falsely – assume that the topology of the floor plans of different levels is identical. Wayfinding strategies for complex buildings For two-dimensional (outdoor) settings a number of different wayfinding strategies have been described. Both Hochmair and Frank (2002) and Conroy-Dalton (2001) have described leastangle strategies: people try to minimise their global deviation from the goal direction while locally maintaining a straight heading whenever possible. Wiener, Schnee and Mallot (2004) were able to show that navigators rely on region-based strategies of fine-to-coarse 1 An earlier version of this experiment was reported at the International Conference Spatial Cognition, SC04, October 2004, Frauenchiemsee, Germany.