skip to main content
research-article

Investigating Human Scale Spatial Experience

Published:05 November 2021Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

Spatial experience, or how humans experience a given space, has been a pivotal topic especially in urban-scale environments. On the human scale, HCI researchers have mostly investigated personal meanings or aesthetic and embodied experiences. In this paper, we investigate the human scale as an ensemble of individual spatial features. Through large-scale online questionnaires we first collected a rich set of spatial features that people generally use to characterize their surroundings. Second, we conducted a set of field interviews to develop a more nuanced understanding of the feature identified as most important: perceived safety. Our combined quantitative and qualitative analysis contributes to spatial understanding as a form of context information and presents a timely investigation into the perceived safety of human scale spaces. By connecting our results to the broader scientific literature, we contribute to the field of HCI spatial understanding.

References

  1. Hamed S. Alavi, Elizabeth F. Churchill, Mikael Wiberg, Denis Lalanne, Peter Dalsgaard, Ava Fatah gen Schieck, and Yvonne Rogers. 2019. Introduction to Human-Building Interaction (HBI): Interfacing HCI with Architecture and Urban Design . ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction , Vol. 26, 2 (March 2019), 6:1--6:10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3309714Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. Christopher Alexander. 1974. Notes on the synthesis of form .Havard University, Cambridge (Mass.).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. Till Ballendat, Nicolai Marquardt, and Saul Greenberg. 2010. Proxemic interaction: designing for a proximity and orientation-aware environment. In ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces - ITS '10. ACM Press, Saarbrücken, Germany, 121. https://doi.org/10.1145/1936652.1936676Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. Jan Blom, Divya Viswanathan, Mirjana Spasojevic, Janet Go, Karthik Acharya, and Robert Ahonius. 2010. Fear and the city: Role of mobile services in harnessing safety and security in urban use contexts. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings , Vol. 3. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 1841--1850. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753602Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. Otto Bollnow. 2021. Human Space. Mimesis International, Sesto San Giovanni, Italy.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke. 2006. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology , Vol. 3 (2006), 77--101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oaGoogle ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  7. Philipp Brauner, Julia van Heek, Martina Ziefle, Nur Al-huda Hamdan, and Jan Borchers. 2017. Interactive FUrniTURE: Evaluation of Smart Interactive Textile Interfaces for Home Environments. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces. ACM, Brighton United Kingdom, 151--160. https://doi.org/10.1145/3132272.3134128Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. Olga Chesnokova, Mario Nowak, and Ross S. Purves. 2017. A crowdsourced model of landscape preference. Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, LIPIcs , Vol. 86, 19 (2017), 1--13. https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2017.19 ISBN: 9783959770439.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  9. Fernanda de Oliveira Capela and Jose Emmanuel Ramirez-Marquez. 2019. Detecting urban identity perception via newspaper topic modeling. Cities , Vol. 93, April (2019), 72--83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.04.009 Publisher: Elsevier.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  10. Anind K. Dey. 2001. Understanding and Using Context . Personal and Ubiquitous Computing , Vol. 5, 1 (Jan. 2001), 4--7. https://doi.org/10.1007/s007790170019Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  11. Dmitrijs Dmitrenko, Emanuela Maggioni, and Marianna Obrist. 2017. OSpace: Towards a Systematic Exploration of Olfactory Interaction Spaces. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces. ACM, Brighton United Kingdom, 171--180. https://doi.org/10.1145/3132272.3134121Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  12. Paul Dourish. 2006. Re-space-ing place: "place" and "space" ten years on. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 299--308. https://doi.org/10.1145/1180875.1180921Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  13. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. 2013. Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming .The MIT Press, United States. https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epv001 ISSN: 0952--4649 Publication Title: Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. Hinnerk Eifeldt. 2019. Supporting urban air mobility with citizen participatory noise sensing: A concept. In The Web Conference 2019 - Companion of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 93--95. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308560.3317059Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  15. Ilker Etikan. 2016. Comparison of Convenience Sampling and Purposive Sampling . American Journal of Theoretical and Applied Statistics , Vol. 5, 1 (2016), 1. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajtas.20160501.11Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  16. Andreas Fender and Jörg Müller. 2019. SpaceState: Ad-Hoc Definition and Recognition of Hierarchical Room States for Smart Environments . In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces. ACM, Daejeon Republic of Korea, 303--314. https://doi.org/10.1145/3343055.3359715Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  17. Jan Gehl. 2010. Cities for people .Island Press, Washington. ISSN: 07310455 Publication Title: Places.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  18. Jorge Goncalves, Simo Hosio, Denzil Ferreira, and Vassilis Kostakos. 2014. Game of words: tagging places through crowdsourcing on public displays. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems. ACM, Vancouver BC Canada, 705--714. https://doi.org/10.1145/2598510.2598514Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  19. Roddy M. Grieves and Kate J. Jeffery. 2017. The representation of space in the brain. Behavioural Processes , Vol. 135 (Feb. 2017), 113--131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2016.12.012Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  20. Edward Twitchell Hall. 1969. The hidden dimension: man's use of space in public and private .Doubleday, New York. https://oula.finna.fi/Record/oula.328721Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  21. Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish. 1996. Re-place-ing space: The roles of place and space in collaborative systems. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 67--76.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  22. B Hillier. 2007. Space is the Machine. A configurational Theory. Space Syntax, London, United Kingdom. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/49843/Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. Steve Howard, Jennie Carroll, John Murphy, and Jane Peck. 2002. Using 'endowed props' in scenario-based design. In ACM International Conference Proceeding Series , Vol. 31. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 1--9. https://doi.org/10.1145/572020.572022Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  24. Yen Chia Hsu, Michael Tasota, Jennifer Cross, Beatrice Dias, Paul Dille, Randy Sargent, Ting Hao Huang, and Illah Nourbakhsh. 2019. Smell Pittsburgh: Community-empowered mobile smell reporting system. In International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Proceedings IUI. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 65--79. https://doi.org/10.1145/3301275.3302293 _eprint: 1810.11143.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  25. Kee Moon Jang and Youngchul Kim. 2019. Crowd-sourced cognitive mapping: A new way of displaying people's cognitive perception of urban space. PLoS ONE , Vol. 14, 6 (2019), 1--18. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0218590 Publisher: Public Library of Science.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  26. Andrew Jenkins, Arie Croitoru, Andrew T. Crooks, and Anthony Stefanidis. 2016. Crowdsourcing a collective sense of place. PLoS ONE , Vol. 11, 4 (April 2016), e0152932. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152932 Publisher: Public Library of Science.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  27. David Kirsh. 2019. Do architects and designers think about interactivity differently? ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction , Vol. 26, 2 (April 2019), 1--43. https://doi.org/10.1145/3301425 Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  28. Peter Gall Krogh, Marianne Graves Petersen, Kenton O'Hara, and Jens Emil Grønbæk. 2017. Sensitizing concepts for socio-spatial literacy in HCI. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , Vol. 2017-May. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 6449--6460. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025756Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  29. Saskia Kuliga, Ruth Conroy Dalton, and Christoph Hölscher. 2013. Aesthetic and emotional appraisal of the Seattle public library and its relation to spatial configuration. In 2013 International Space Syntax Symposium. Sejong University Press, Sejong. ISBN: 9788986177213.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  30. Florian Lederbogen, Peter Kirsch, Leila Haddad, Fabian Streit, Heike Tost, Philipp Schuch, Stefan Wüst, Jens C. Pruessner, Marcella Rietschel, Michael Deuschle, and Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg. 2011. City living and urban upbringing affect neural social stress processing in humans. Nature , Vol. 474, 7352 (June 2011), 498--501. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10190Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  31. H. Lefebvre. 1991. The production of space .Blackwell Publishing, Oxford. https://doi.org/10.2307/490789 ISSN: 04353684 Publication Title: The production of space.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  32. Laura Lentini and Françoise Decortis. 2010. Space and places: When interacting with and in physical space becomes a meaningful experience. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing , Vol. 14, 5 (2010), 407--415. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-009-0267-yGoogle ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  33. Pall J. Lindal and Terry Hartig. 2013. Architectural variation, building height, and the restorative quality of urban residential streetscapes. Journal of Environmental Psychology , Vol. 33 (March 2013), 26--36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2012.09.003Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  34. Emanuela Maggioni, Robert Cobden, Dmitrijs Dmitrenko, Kasper Hornbæk, and Marianna Obrist. 2020. SMELL SPACE: Mapping out the Olfactory Design Space for Novel Interactions . ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction , Vol. 27, 5 (Aug. 2020), 1--26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3402449Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  35. Nora McDonald, Sarita Schoenebeck, and Andrea Forte. 2019. Reliability and Inter-rater Reliability in Qualitative Research: Norms and Guidelines for CSCW and HCI Practice . Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction , Vol. 3, CSCW (Nov. 2019), 1--23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359174Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  36. Daniel R. Montello. 2014. Spatial Cognition and Architectural Space: Research Perspectives . Architectural Design , Vol. 84, 5 (2014), 74--79. https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.1811 _eprint: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ad.1811.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  37. Sara Nabil, Thomas Plötz, and David S. Kirk. 2017. Interactive Architecture: Exploring and Unwrapping the Potentials of Organic User Interfaces. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction. ACM, Yokohama Japan, 89--100. https://doi.org/10.1145/3024969.3024981Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  38. Oscar Newman. 1996. Creating Defensible Space. Technical Report. Institute for Community Design Analysis.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  39. Jonas Oppenlaender, Kristy Milland, Aku Visuri, Panos Ipeirotis, and Simo Hosio. 2020. Creativity on Paid Crowdsourcing Platforms . In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1--14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376677Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  40. Juhani Pallasmaa. 2006. Eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses .Academy Editions, London. https://oula.finna.fi/Record/oula.501718 www.wileyeurope.com ISSN: 07460554 Publication Title: Architect.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  41. Juhani Pallasmaa. 2014. Space, place and atmosphere. Emotion and peripherical perception in architectural experience. Lebenswelt: Aesthetics and Philosophy of Experience , Vol. 0, 4 (July 2014), 230--245. https://doi.org/10.13130/2240--9599/4202Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  42. Annemarie Ruijsbroek, Mariël Droomers, Peter P. Groenewegen, Wim Hardyns, and Karien Stronks. 2015. Social safety, self-rated general health and physical activity: Changes in area crime, area safety feelings and the role of social cohesion. Health and Place , Vol. 31 (2015), 39--45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2014.10.008Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  43. Gillian M. Sandstrom, Neal Lathia, Cecilia Mascolo, and Peter J. Rentfrow. 2017. Putting mood in context: Using smartphones to examine how people feel in different locations. Journal of Research in Personality , Vol. 69, C (2017), 96--101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2016.06.004Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  44. Christine Satchell and Marcus Foth. 2011. Welcome to the jungle: HCI after dark. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 753--762. https://doi.org/10.1145/1979742.1979630 ISBN: 9781450302289.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  45. Susanne Schmidt, Frank Steinicke, Andrew Irlitti, and Bruce H Thomas. 2018. Floor-Projected Guidance Cues for Collaborative Exploration of Spatial Augmented Reality Setups . In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 11.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  46. Avishag Shemesh, Gerry Leisman, Moshe Bar, and Yasha Jacob Grobman. 2021. A neurocognitive study of the emotional impact of geometrical criteria of architectural space. Architectural Science Review , Vol. 64, 4 (July 2021), 394--407. https://doi.org/10.1080/00038628.2021.1940827Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  47. Peter Sloterdijk. 2016. Spheres. Volume 3, Foams : plural spherology .Semiotext(e), South Pasadena, Calif. Publication Title: Semiotext(e) foreign agents series.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  48. Shenando Stals, Michael Smyth, and Oli Mival. 2019. UrbanixD: From ethnography to speculative design fictions for the hybrid city. In ACM International Conference Proceeding Series. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1--10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3363384.3363486Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  49. Yuichiro Takeuchi. 2014. Towards Habitable Bits: Digitizing the Built Environment. In Proceedings of the Ninth ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces - ITS '14. ACM Press, Dresden, Germany, 209--218. https://doi.org/10.1145/2669485.2669506Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  50. Michael Wessely, Ticha Sethapakdi, Carlos Castillo, Jackson C. Snowden, Ollie Hanton, Isabel P. S. Qamar, Mike Fraser, Anne Roudaut, and Stefanie Mueller. 2020. Sprayable User Interfaces: Prototyping Large-Scale Interactive Surfaces with Sensors and Displays. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, Honolulu HI USA, 1--12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376249Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  51. Jill Palzkill Woelfer, Amy Iverson, David G. Hendry, Batya Friedman, and Brian T. Gill. 2011. Improving the safety of homeless young people with mobile phones: Values, form and function. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 1707--1716. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979191Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  52. Xiaoyi Yuan and Andrew Crooks. 2019. Assessing the placeness of locations through user-contributed content. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on AI for Geographic Knowledge Discovery, GeoAI 2019 (GeoAI 2019). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 15--23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3356471.3365231 ISBN: 9781450369572.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. Investigating Human Scale Spatial Experience

          Recommendations

          Comments

          Login options

          Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

          Sign in

          Full Access

          • Published in

            cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
            Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 5, Issue ISS
            ISS
            November 2021
            481 pages
            EISSN:2573-0142
            DOI:10.1145/3498314
            Issue’s Table of Contents

            Copyright © 2021 ACM

            Publisher

            Association for Computing Machinery

            New York, NY, United States

            Publication History

            • Published: 5 November 2021
            Published in pacmhci Volume 5, Issue ISS

            Permissions

            Request permissions about this article.

            Request Permissions

            Check for updates

            Qualifiers

            • research-article

          PDF Format

          View or Download as a PDF file.

          PDF

          eReader

          View online with eReader.

          eReader
          About Cookies On This Site

          We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

          Learn more

          Got it!