Wayfinding

Wayfinding is the cognitive-conceptual process of finding and planning a route from an origin to a destination through a known, partially known, or [Page 3080]unknown environment. Travel from an origin to a destination is a fundamental human activity that nearly everyone completes on a daily basis. The centrality of wayfinding to humans is made evident by the expanding knowledge domain specific to wayfinding and related concepts as well as the booming, multimillion-dollar industry providing services and support for wayfinding and navigation technologies.

Wayfinding should be distinguished from locomotion (movement) and navigation. Wayfinding is the cognitive-conceptual aspect of route finding and planning, locomotion refers to the actual physical movement of a cognitive agent in an environment, and navigation is a stylized form of wayfinding that typically includes guiding a vehicle such as a ship or an aircraft. Wayfinding's cognitive-conceptual nature is stressed as it synthesizes complex cognitive processes (e.g., landmark recognition, route retracing, route planning, route selection, path integration) with conceptual primitives of spatial knowledge (location, direction, distance, connectivity, and spatiotemporal sequence).

The basis for wayfinding is knowledge about one's environment, or if knowledge (internal/ mental or external) is not available, the administration of a wayfinding strategy to uncover such knowledge. In addition to the primitives of spatial knowledge mentioned above, successful wayfinding also requires knowledge about landmarks (salient objects located in an environment), knowledge about routes (how landmarks and other salient locations are connected), and survey knowledge (how landmarks and routes are spatially arranged).

Research on landmarks has undergone a renaissance in recent years because of the increased availability of navigation devices and improved analysis functions for identifying landmarks for use in navigation services. Mimicking the extensive human emphasis on landmarks when wayfinding, several technological developments now allow for the automatic identification and selection of landmarks in databases, three-dimensional city models, and the Internet. Across all proposed landmark taxonomies, two orthogonal approaches can be distinguished: (1) reference to the landmarks themselves, identifying three kinds of landmark salience (visual, semantic, and structural), and (2) focus on the geometric conceptualization of the landmark when used in wayfinding and navigation, indentifying three geometric dimensions (pointlike, linear, or area-like).

Figure 1 The interaction among wayfinder, environment, and representations of the environment

Source: Author.

The first step in every wayfinding activity is to determine one's location in the environment. This location information, from a cognitive point of view, is not the exact coordinate pair at which a wayfinder is located but an alignment of the wayfinder's mental representation of the environment and the information the wayfinder is accessing either directly (through perceiving his or her surroundings) or indirectly (e.g., through a map). Figure 1 shows this triangular relationship schematically with relations among the wayfinder, the environment, and an external knowledge source such as a map.

Some wayfinding strategies are employed when one's current location or possible wayfinding routes are partially or completely unknown. In these cases, the term wayfinding is used in its most literal sense: to find one's way. Other wayfinding strategies are specific to route choice behavior; that is, from a given set of known alternatives a specific route is chosen. Examples are choosing the shortest or longest route segment first or choosing the route segments with the smallest deviating angle from the destination.

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