WAYFINDING PERFORMANCE IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Wayfinding is a basic activity that people do throughout their entire lives as they navigate from one place to another. Wayfinding behavior is the purposeful and motivated movement from an origin to a specific distant destination that cannot be directly perceived by the traveler. It involves interaction between the wayfinder and the architectural built environment. Two aspects of knowledge are essential in our daily wayfinding performance: knowledge in the surrounding environment (knowledge in the world) and knowledge treated inside the person (knowledge in the head). The lack of information in previous studies concerning the degree of trade-offs between both aspects of knowledge when performing wayfinding tasks in the built environment constitutes the main research problem. The aim of the present research is: Arriving at the establishment of a theoretical model for the process of wayfinding in the built environment depending on degrees of trade-offs between knowledge in the head and knowledge in the world. This requires the building of the theoretical framework in the light of which the main research hypothesis is presented. The framework is then applied to a selected architectural environment in order to test the validity of the hypothesis and eventually to extract the principles and mechanism of wayfinding phenomenon in the built environment. The results of the research, in both its theoretical and practical aspects, showed significant relations between the degree of familiarity and performance on the cognitive tasks (wayfinding missions); the more frequent transactions with the environment, the higher the degree of organization of knowledge in the mind.