Affordances based on traces of use in urban environments

Abstract

Traces of use in public environments show the behaviour patterns of the masses. Taking advantage of this quality, we want to use such traces as design tool to indicate pos-sible interactions in e.g. newly built areas while keeping a natural and calm environment. Due to current lacking knowledge about such traces, this work aims at understand-ing the perception of traces of use in public places. There-fore we collected a total of 182 pictures of traces of use in urban environments. A focus group discussed and classified a preselected set of pictures. In an online picture viewing survey, 18 different pictures were reviewed for pattern iden-Tification (N= 32-52). Overlaps were visualized in heatmaps. We contribute an analysis of which public traces of use are easy to recognize with great agreement and which are not.