IN THE PICTURE
Wayfinding strategies in high-rise buildings
Wandering aimlessly, or on the right path? A study now shows how people can better orient themselves in buildings. | Graphic: Takizawa et al.
“Architecture should take into account how people function cognitively”, says Michal Gath-Morad. She’s the lead author of a study conducted by a team of researchers from ETH Zurich and the University of Cambridge. They placed 149 people in a virtual environment with multilevel buildings and asked them to search for specific rooms. By tracing the paths taken by their test subjects, Gath-Morad found that they were more efficient in their search when there was a good line of sight to the stairwell from everywhere in the building. In the illustration here, we see the paths taken by participants searching for an office (different search strategies are given in blue and red; black signifies a single path).
