Classifying visually appealing elements in parks using social media data-assisted eye-tracking: Case study of Shinsui parks in Tokyo, Japan

Abstract

To meet the growing outdoor recreational needs of urban residents, it is essential for researchers to comprehend how visitors perceive and evaluate landscape elements in outdoor recreational spaces. Parks are central places for urban residents to conduct short-term leisure activities. Through a case analysis of four Shinsui parks in Tokyo, Japan, this study validated the significance of visually appealing elements for park scenes and proposed a new method for evaluating and classifying them. In this study, the method relies predominantly on eye-tracking experiments involving 17 participants to screen visually appealing elements and determine their visual appeal and quality. Geolocation information and texts from 2821 tweets posted by social media users were used to aid in the material selection for eye-tracking experiments and to comprehend the sharing tendencies and sentiments of site visitors towards elements. Through clustering and content analysis, the 20 visually appealing elements were divided into five groups for interpretation. By demonstrating the operation process and classification results, this method is expected to help managers improve landscapes in a targeted manner and provide a pleasing visual environment and positive emotional experience for visitors. Management implicationsFor managers, establishing a proper evaluation and classification system will help them to comprehend and improve park elements. To improve visitor satisfaction, it is important for park managers to have access to information about the location, content, and quality of visually appealing elements in parks. This study found that visually appealing elements such as animals, flowering plants and children playing with water often had high visual quality and sentiment value for visitors. It also indicated that visually appealing elements such as fitness and play equipment, signboards and other features had low visual quality, and hence it is important to explore how they could be improved so they are not only functional, but also add aesthetic value to parks. The method used here provides a new orientation for outdoor recreational space management starting from landscape details. It could be applied in other settings to better understand visually appealing elements in parks.