Structuring Space with Image Schemata: Wayfinding in Airport as a
Case StudyStructuring Space with Imge Schemata: Wayfinding in
Airport as a Case Study
Martin Raubal,
Max Egenhofer, Dieter Pfoser, and Nectaria Tryfona COSIT '97, Laurel Highlands, PA,
S. Hirtle and A. Frank (eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1329, Springer-Verlag, pp. 85-102, October 1997.
Abstract
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 experiential 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.
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Martin Raubal,
Max Egenhofer, 
Dieter Pfoser, and 
Nectaria Tryfona