Hospitals are complex environments full of many visitors, staff members, and patients. This kind of environment can make simple navigation difficult for visitors in particular. This is especially true for visitors who do not come to the hospital frequently, leading to potential instances of stress for the visitors and the patients they are planning to visit. “Wayfinding” is a theoretical framework for understanding generally how the human mind comprehends spaces and learns how to navigate through them. The more research that is done to understand how visitors mentally form their own spatial experience and learn how to navigate bustling healthcare spaces, the more prepared designers will be able to provide helpful wayfinding tools and designs.
To understand how hospital visitors comprehend healthcare environments and develop their own wayfinding methods so that supportive navigation designs may be better developed in the future.
Field observations were conducted in the outpatient area of an Indonesian general hospital. Ten participants were involved, all of whom were assumed to be new visitors of the hospital. Each participant underwent a “wayfinding journey” during which they verbalized their experiences and actions and were not allowed to ask others for directions. A total of 40 wayfinding journeys were observed, along with video and transcriptional data. All data were analyzed for verbal expressions relating to hospital map layouts.
To portray the general findings of this study’s results, analysis of a single participant’s wayfinding journey was shown through 11 different visual scenes, relations to verbal experiences, and relations to the hospital map itself. The combination of narrative data, observational data, and hospital maps revealed insight into the participant’s overall wayfinding experience, specifically: narratives of wayfinding being formed through specific physical environment markers or pathway changes, the importance of response to the environment in forming an internal guidance system, and that every wayfinding decision is related to another previous or anticipated wayfinding decision.
The authors note that a relatively small sample size was observed in this study, and that the phase of the study design involving manual interpretations of hospital maps was vulnerable to highly subjective output. This study was conducted in a single hospital over a relatively short period of time.