Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of environmental legibility in an era where digital mobile maps guide many everyday journeys. This paper presents data from a real-world navigational experiment, where participants followed urban routes either by using digital maps, or information in the world around them. They then completed an in-field task that probed recognition for environmental features along the routes. As predicted, participants in the digital map group demonstrated poorer memory for elements that underlie legibility, across landmarks, paths, and nodes. However, recognition in this group was moderated by individual characteristics of these elements, suggesting a role for legibility in memory. The paper discusses the implications of these results for the design of urban environments that can militate against varied navigational experiences.
Highlights
In recent years, some aspects of urban navigation appear to be supported less by the legibility of the environment itself, and more by digital navigation systems
As a result of this, we proposed some suggestions for urban design guidelines as how they could enhance legibility for different types of users
The first is to examine whether there is a difference in recognition memory for different elements of an unfamiliar urban setting, depending on whether individuals navigated using digital maps on mobile devices, or without Global Positioning System (GPS) assistance
Summary
Some aspects of urban navigation appear to be supported less by the legibility of the environment itself, and more by digital navigation systems. The potential need for this refinement lies in the method that we chose to focus on in our previous report (Ahmadpoor and Smith, 2020); namely, the use of sketch maps to examining mental representation of space Whilst this form of data provides a very rich assay of an individual’s configural understanding of an environment and its contents, the veracity of the data arguably depends upon a number of factors that may be subject to some inter-individual differences, such as the vividness of visual imagery (Cui et al, 2007) and drawing ability (van Sommers, 1984). Length of the path is a factor that can influence people’s spatial knowledege acquisition (Evans et al 1984b; Haque et al 2006,Guérard and Tremblay, 2012)
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