In this book review, Craig Berger will discuss the compelling contents of Library Signage and Wayfinding Design: Communicating Effectively with Your Users, which was written by Mark Aaron Polger. 

In recent years, the problem of inferring and utilizing semantic information has gained considerable interest within the mobile robotics community. In this paper we focus on the problem of how to utilize the local semantic information of objects in a map to solve a navigation task more efficiently. In particular, we consider a wayfinding task and choose a supermarket environment as an example d...

Simulation of human behavior in space is a powerful research method to advance our understanding of the interaction between people and their environment. It allows for both the examination and testing of models and their underlying theory of cognitive and perceptual phenomena as well as the observation of the system’s behavior. This paper outlines the use of specific spatial objects to facilita...

The paper is concerned with the empirical investigation of different types of schematised maps. In two experiments a standard floor plan was compared to three strongly schematised maps providing only route knowledge. With the help of one of the maps, the participants had to localise themselves in two tasks and performed two wayfinding tasks in a multi-level building they didn’t know before. We ...

Asking other people the way has always been a widespread social wayfinding technique. In recent years wayfinding in unknown spatial environments has increasingly been supported by electronic navigation assistants. However, the social aspects of wayfinding, such as using other peoples’ experiences, have widely been ignored in the context of electronic navigation systems. In electronic environmen...

Previous studies have reported sex differences in wayfinding performance among adults. Men are typically better at using Euclidean information and survey strategies while women are better at using landmark information and route strategies. However, relatively few studies have examined sex differences in wayfinding in children. This research investigated relationships between route learning perf...

This study investigated the effect of different organizations of landmark-location pairings as fine-space information on wayfinding behavior and spatial knowledge on a total of 90 participants: 30 second graders, 30 sixth graders, and 30 adults. All participants had to find their way to a goal in a virtual environment with either randomized or categorical landmarks, or without any landmarks. Th...

A novel wayfinding system is presented with an aim to increase workplace and life independence for cognitive-impaired patients such as people with traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy, mental retardation, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. It is based on geo-coded QR codes which embed the coordinate (x, y, floor) and social computing that helps shorten the learning curve for the people w...

Wayfinding is defined as the ability to learn and remember a route through an environment. Previous researchers have shown that young children have difficulties remembering routes. However, very few researchers have considered how to improve young children's wayfinding abilities. Therefore, we investigated ways to help children increase their wayfinding skills. In two studies, a total of 72 5-y...

Purpose The aim of this work is to explore the use of lightweight but effective user interfaces for mobile navigation and wayfinding in urban environments. Design/methodology/approach – Two interactive mobile interfaces were designed and implemented following a user centred approach. The first interface makes use of 2D digital technology such as different representations of 2D maps and textual ...