Directed visibility analysis: Three case studies on the relationship between building layout, perception and behavior

This is a study of the spatial affordances of buildings that allow them to organize and transmit cultural ideas and to support the performance of organizational roles. The particular affordances under consideration are those that arise from the manner in which buildings structure the visual fields that are potentially available to a situated observer. Previous studies have shown that patterns of communication in offices, patterns of viewing and learning in exhibition spaces, patterns of everyday life in restrictive environments and patterns of wayfinding in hospitals are all systematically affected by the structure of visual fields. This study shows that the impact of spatial organization becomes clearer when we draw a distinction between generic visibility patterns and directed visibility patterns.;In studying generic visibility patterns we consider all parts of a setting that are visible from each occupiable location. In studying directed visibility patterns we focus on a previously specified set of visual targets and ask how many become visible from each occupiable location. Parametric restrictions concerning the direction into which a subject faces and the viewing angle sustained by the target object are also taken into consideration. The aim is to demonstrate how such refinements of visibility analysis, supported by the development of appropriate analytical tools, lead to more precise and penetrating insights as to how building users tune their behavior to the spatial affordances of environment, and how the environment impacts their understanding in turn. Three different studies were presented. All of them dealt with specific type of built environments in which the main task of the users is to attend visually to a fixed set of objects. The fist used directed visibility measures to evaluate the affordances of different nursing-unit designs relative to how well nurses are able to survey patients in different rooms as they go about their duties. The second study focuses on the manner in which nurses and physicians position themselves in a Neuro Intensive Care Unit (ICU), particularly when interacting. The third study investigates how aware exhibition visitors become of the visual structure of environment and how the visibility structure of exhibitions affects the ability of visitors to conceptually group paintings according to their thematic content.;The case studies reported in the thesis support the following conclusions.;1) The way in which people position themselves in an environment as they perform their assigned tasks is tuned to the way in which visual fields are structured. Thus, the pattern of space occupancy over time becomes a quantifiable material manifestation of role performance. This is as true in an ICU, where nurses and physicians perform differentiated tasks regarding the patients as it is in a virtual museum where visitors are asked to view exhibits. An important implication for spatial cognition follows: the visual structure of environment is cognitively registered in a natural way, as demonstrated by the quantifiable fine tuning of behaviors relative to them.;2) The visual structure of environment is contingent upon the interaction between the underlying structure of visual fields and paths of movement. Moving and seeing are correlated quite strongly. This become more evident in the virtual museum, where correlations between visual fields and visitors' responses to questions become much stronger when visual fields are analyzed taking into account the path walked rather than the setting as a whole.;3) Directed visibility analysis leads to stronger correlations with behavior and performance than generic visibility analysis. This implies that environments are layered. Their underlying spatial structure is charged by the distribution of the contents that are programmatically primary: paintings in a museum, patients in an ICU. By implication, the critical question that is highlighted by the thesis concerns the way in which the spatial allocation of programmatic elements charges an existing building layout. This is fundamental to the interplay between long term and short term building features, or, put more directly, the interplay between building architecture and interior architecture.