Abstract

Accurate assessment of people's preferences for different outdoor lighting applications is increasingly considered important in the development of new urban environments. Here a new method of random environmental walking is proposed to complement current methods of assessing urban lighting applications, such as self-report questionnaires. The procedure involves participants repeatedly walking between different lighting applications by random selection of a lighting application and preferred choice or by random selection of a lighting application alone. In this manner, participants are exposed to all lighting applications of interest more than once and participants' preferences for the different lighting applications are reflected in the number of times they walk to each lighting application. On the basis of an initial simulation study, to explore the feasibility of this approach, a comprehensive field test was undertaken. The field test included random environmental walking and collection of participants' subjective ratings of perceived pleasantness (PP), perceived quality, perceived strength, and perceived flicker of four lighting applications. The results indicate that random environmental walking can reveal participants' preferences for different lighting applications that, in the present study, conformed to participants' ratings of PP and perceived quality of the lighting applications. As a complement to subjectively stated environmental preferences, random environmental walking has the potential to expose behavioral preferences for different lighting applications.

Keywords

lighting assessment; random walking; structured walking; urban quality; pedestrians

Published in

Frontiers in Psychology
2017, Volume: 8, article number: 345

SLU Authors

• Jansson, Märit

  • Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG11 Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable


UKÄ Subject classification

Landscape Architecture


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00345

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/83744