| During emergencies,evacuation is the primary human behavior that occurs and is also one of the most critical behaviors determining occupant safety.Researchers have divided the complete emergency evacuation process into two processes: the preevacuation period and the movement period.The second period has been widely studied by researchers,in which “wayfinding” is the primary focused human behavior,and yet,the first pre-evacuation period remains relatively unexplored.The pre-evacuation period has been described by researchers as the “delay time”since it lasts from seconds to hours which could postpone evacuation significantly.Three obvious reasons have been identified in the literature:(i)as the primary evacuation signal worldwide,the ISO evacuation alarm(ISO 8201: 2017)has been proved ineffective.On the one hand,people can hardly identify it as an evacuation signal due to cue ambiguities,and on the other hand,the low perceived urgency failed to convince people to stop their pre-emergency activities and start to evacuate;(ii)preemergency activities,e.g.,working,shopping,eating,and watching football,may significantly affect people’s emergency responses towards to surroundings,especially to evacuation signal,due to the involvement or commitment to activities takes up their cognitive capacity for processing information,making them miss the cues;(iii)reallife evacuation experiments are difficult to conduct,problems such as ethical and safety concerns(e.g.,exposing participants to danger),time and financial costs,and lacking experimental control,have always been challenging.The objective is to design new solutions for emergency evacuation,considering the inefficacy of the ISO evacuation alarm during the pre-evacuation period,using a Virtual Reality(VR)-based methodology.For this objective,the research first summarized a VR-based research framework based on the development of VR technology in current emergency human behavior studies.The framework aims to create a successful VR experience,and researchers can conduct VR-based research activities according to their needs through the seven main steps defined by the framework,such as product evaluation in hazardous environments and humanenvironment interaction studies.Second,three goals were established to achieve the main objective:(i)develop and evaluate a virtual environment(VE)for investigating the efficiency of the ISO-type evacuation alarm during the pre-evacuation period;(ii)based on the VE,produce a new evacuation solution through a human-centered design(HCD)approach,considering the inefficiency of the ISO alarm during the preevacuation period;(iii)evaluate the new evacuation solution through a VR-based methodology with improved warning efficiency.To achieve these goals,two co-related experiments(chapters three and five)and a design activity(chapter four)were conducted and documented according to the "Scandinavian Model" structure.Finally,the study successfully validated a technology-based evacuation alarm concept with improved warning efficacy compared to the regular ISO evacuation alarm.The main innovation of this paper is the HCD-based research strategy,which through a VR-based methodology,considers the academic achievements of psychology,sociology,and engineering in emergency human behavior studies,providing better solutions for the pre-evacuation period of a building emergency.On the one hand,this interdisciplinary perspective filled the gap between emergency human behavior studies and design research.On the other hand,the method of combining a human-centered design approach with VR technics for emergency evacuation research:(i)verified the use of VR-based methodology as a valid way of studying evacuation efficiency during the pre-evacuation period,providing practical design guidelines for future alarm designs;(ii)validated the effectiveness of the VR-based research framework proposed in this study,deepening the depth of design discipline in this field;(iii)broke through the limitations and bottlenecks in the performing of real-life evacuation experiments,widening the scope of the HCD approach by using VR as an alternative tool for design evaluation. |
