Tours and Maps Operations as Movement Mechanism in Indoor Wayfinding

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of wayfinding and human movement in a complex building. It focuses on the operations people perform to enable themselves to move from one place to another during the process of searching for a destination in a building. The wayfinding operations build upon the concept of tours and maps proposed by de Certeau (1984). This paper analyses how the tours and the maps operations were employed and distributed in a wayfinding journey within a building, with these operations enabling visitors to reach a certain destination in the building. The tours and maps operations were revealed by looking into the wayfinding narrative based on observations of participants executing wayfinding tasks. The results of the study indicate that the length of a wayfinding journey conforms to the number of operations performed.  Both tours and maps operations had the same role in regulating the movements in the wayfinding journeys. While the tours operations regulated how people moved from place to place, the maps operations supported their movements by giving information from the surrounding environment. Understanding movement mechanisms by exploring operations in a wayfinding journey could contribute to the development of digital navigation systems for indoor wayfinding. 

Keywords

• complex building
• journey
• movement
• operation
• wayfinding