Wayfinding systems are the signs, color-schemes, and other features of large, complex buildings that serve as aids in navigation. Unfortunately, wayfinding is often treated as an "afterthought" rather than as an integral part of the architectural design process. In healthcare facilities, difficulties in wayfinding have been shown to be a major source of stress for patients and visitors, as well as a significant burden on hospital staff members and an obstacle to operational efficiency. Testing and evaluating wayfinding systems is difficult, because each facility is unique and trying out many different wayfinding options in the same building to see which one works best would be financially and logistically implausible. Thus, there is currently no good method to rigorously compare the success of different wayfinding design strategies. To help solve this problem, the researchers will develop a new platform to evaluate and optimize wayfinding design in specific healthcare facilities before those wayfinding features are physically constructed. Virtual-reality (VR) testing will be used to accomplish this purpose. Participants in the study will don VR headsets, along with various biometric sensors to help evaluate their stress levels. They will then be asked to complete common navigational tasks in a virtual replica of a hospital building, such as finding their way from the main entrance to a specific patient room. Using a virtual replica of the building allows the researchers to easily swap out different wayfinding features, thereby determining what types of navigational aids are most effective for improving wayfinding and reducing stress. The study will contribute to the development of a new type of research platform that can be used to conduct human-response testing for many different environmental design variables, even beyond wayfinding. It will promote greater attention to the needs of building users, including minority experiences (such as those of disabled users) that have been historically overlooked in design. The ultimate goal of the project is to streamline the virtual design-testing process so that other designers and researchers can easily implement this approach and benefit from rigorous pre-construction testing.
The VR testing platform designed and developed as part of this project will use actual design information for planned hospital complexes, importing the data directly from commonly used designed-industry software. Study participants will experience different versions of the facilities that integrate different combinations of possible wayfinding designs. As the participants complete wayfinding tasks in the virtual buildings, the researchers will collect biometric data including electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (EKG) signals to serve as objective measures of stress and confusion, as well as behavioral data about the participants? actions in the environment and their navigational success. Self-reported data about conscious evaluations and reactions to the environment will also be collected from the participants. Two pilot studies will be conducted in the context of a healthcare facility that is currently under contract by the research team?s industry partners, testing actual wayfinding designs that may be used in the final constructed facility. The first pilot study will focus on different types and combinations of color patterns, pictograms, and architectural features for wayfinding. The second pilot study will focus on the wayfinding impact of different external view conditions (the placement of windows and various exterior landmarks). As part of the research, the team will investigate and confirm brain activity (EEG) classifiers, i.e., neural signatures, for wayfinding success, by triangulating this data with the behavioral and self-reported findings. By using these neural signatures and other biometric interpretations, the project will provide specific findings to improve the facility being investigated in the pilot tests. These results will be incorporated in a platform that will be made available to other researchers as a generalized software tool to support VR-based design testing with integrated biometric sensor data. In future work, the research platform can be extended to study other implementations of wayfinding design in different types of facilities, and potentially to examine human responses to a broad range of additional design variables. Rigorous virtual testing of architectural designs has the potential to greatly expand the evidence-based design paradigm, promoting responsible, data-driven innovation in the field and leading to more effective and healthy built environments.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
