Mapping Behaviors - examples of graphics used to portray findings in various typologies

Here I am just sharing a few graphics from papers I am reading of studies that use "Behavioral Mapping". Behavioral Mapping is a way of gathering information - or evidence about a certain environment, which can be used as evidence for design decisions. It involves recording spatial information - usually on a map, and information about the activities that are done at that location. Being a visual person I enjoy how graphics portray information and the various ways researchers visualize concepts. Shown here are examples from urban planning, nursing home design, middle school design, and playground design. Behavioral mapping is also used in hospital design,  parks, environmental design, library design, museum design, neuroscience and computer science.

 Sanoff, Henry, and Gary Coates. 1971. “Behavioral Mapping.” International Journal of Environmental Studies 2: 227–35.

This map show where children played in a residential neighborhood. Lager dots mean more people.

Sandra Horne, Martin. 2002. “The Classroom Environment and Its Effects on the Practice of Teachers.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 22 (1–2): 139–56.

Movement of a teacher around a classroom based on how the desks were arranged.

Pasalar, Celen. 2003. “The Effects of Spatial Layouts on Students’ Interactions in Middle Schools: Multiple Case Studies.” North Carolina State University.

Various ways to examine the layout of middle schools and how we can analyze them. These show connectivity, activities, various levels of seclusion in certain areas, correlational graphs and examples of typical school layouts.

Marušić, Barbara Goličnik. 2010. “Analysis of Patterns of Spatial Occupancy in Urban Open Space Using Behaviour Maps and GIS.” URBAN DESIGN International 16 (1): 36–50.

some examples of mapping of urban plazas using overlays, dots, symbols and gathering spaces.

Milke, Doris L, Charles H M Beck, Stefani Danes, and James Leask. 2009. “Behavioral Mapping of Residents’ Activity in Five Residential Style Care Centers for Elderly Persons Diagnosed with Dementia: Small Differences in Sites Can Affect Behaviors.” Journal of Housing For the Elderly 23 (4): 335–67.

Graphs indicating activities that Elderly persons with Dementia participate in during a day.

 Zamani, Zahara, and Robin Moore. 2013. “The Cognitive Play Behaviour Affordances of Natural and Manufactured Elements within Outdoor Preschool Settings.” Landscape Research 1: 268–78.

Playground behavior maps showing where children play in a playground.

Ozdemir, Aydin, and Oguz Yilmaz. 2008. “Assessment of Outdoor School Environments and Physical Activity in Ankara’s Primary Schools.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 28 (3): 287–300.

Scoring of school yard environments based on student satisfaction. (this is actually a pretty interesting study on school yards comparing a number of spaces)

Cosco, Nilda G, Robin C Moore, and Mohammed Z Islam. 2010. “Behavior Mapping: A Method for Linking Preschool Physical Activity and Outdoor Design.” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 42 (3): 513–19.

Behavior mapping of a playground showing activity levels, and a graph showing the"affordances" of various ground covers.

Something new. I've been thinking about school design. :)

What if we could design school buildings that help kids learn?

We know that environments affect how we feel, how focused we are, and how comfortable we are to do certain things – like meeting new people, or expressing ourselves. If we know it as adults, what about kids?  How is the environment affecting how they feel and behave? If they spend most of their time in school, how is that environment designed to bring out the best in them? So many factors contribute to a child’s success in learning. The teacher, the family life, other kids a kid’s personality, but yet, have we considered the role that buildings and environments might play?

I like to think of the design of spaces in two ways. Firstly there is the functional approach. In this way you think about all the activities you would like to do in a space and make sure that you can do these things there. You might think – “OK, we want to play basketball at our school – so we need a gym, a hoop and a court”. This will be a space that provides for the needs of kinesthetic children. As a designer you would go to all the teachers and ask what activities they do, and what space they need to do these and then design to make sure you have all of these things available.

The second approach is phenomenological. That is a big word to talk about how a space makes you feel, in a more profound sort of way. It’s like when you walk into a room and you just feel sort of cold, and isolated, or you walk into another and it feels calm. The things that architects and designers manipulate to induce these types of experiences for people include the size of spaces, the shape of rooms, the materials of the space, openings, windows, doors, lighting, acoustics, even the smell. All of these things together create an environment that can have an effect on a person. Especially on a child.

With this in mind, the schools we currently use have been designed from a functional perspective. There are rooms that are a certain size to house a certain number of kids. They are built as a shell to protect kids from the environment and to provide space for desks and chalk board and all that stuff. They usually have a gym and a few extra rooms, and all of these are connected with hallways designed to be a certain width to allow exit in case of a fire.

All this is good.  All this is great.

But then, have we stopped to think about what all of this feels like for a child? And even more specifically - how does it affect their learning?

Current thinking in education supports all sorts of learning styles. Some innovative classroom techniques include movement therapy, brain gym, kinesthetic learning, outdoor learning, learning through play, and art centered learning. We build new schools all the time, and buildings last usually 25-50 years. Shouldn’t we want to adjust the architectural model we are using to represent the latest in what we know about learning? New pedagogical methods are adapting and evolving rapidly. Are new schools being designed to adapt to these changes? And if we are going to design schools with these things is mind – what would we do?

So, actually, I think this is a lot to chew on, but I like to think about ways that we can start to really understand children, and how they are affected by their environments. Are there ways that a school design can help their learning in a holistic way? Not just adding more facilities, but looking at the experience of space in a school. How can we find this out? What methods can we use to study children’s behaviors and how they are affected by their environments? And then, how can we translate this into better school designs to bring out the best in our kids?

Changing the way we think about designing stuff for kids. - Heft'sTaxonomy of Affordances of Children's Environments

I really enjoyed this article (see below - Heft 1988). I am using it for my paper, but I enjoyed reading it as a Designer. It was published 27 years ago, but I think the message in it has much untapped value.

The basic concept is that the world of objects and items can be viewed in terms of how we engage with them, rather than as the various names we have given them that describe their form, or shape or image. This is obviously useful for designers who are thinking about how to create an environment that will provide opportunities for people to do certain things. The theoretical concept is "affordance" (Gibson 1979). Affordance is the qualities of an environment or object that provides opportunities for behaviors.

Of course, how we behave in an environment depends on many things - children will behave differently than an elderly person, people who are in a crowd or part of a group will behave differently than when alone for example. That is part of the idea of affordance. The affordance is a combination of the human perception and the environmental features.

Heft in the 80's decided to further this idea by creating a categorization of objects based on their affordances rather than their form. So, lets say he was looking at a park, instead of listing "trees", "fence" and "bench", he would first try to understand it through the perspective of the person he was designing for. In this case children. So in this case his list would be "Climb-able", "squeeze-through-able", "jump-off-able" etc. Because this is how these things would be engaged with by a child. He created a sort of master-list or taxonomy by studying a few documented studies that had been done previously where researchers followed children around all day and recorded absolutely everything they did. Heft went through these studies and recorded every object that the children engaged with in terms of their affordances. He came up with a master list that describes all the objects children engaged with in terms of how the children used them.

I think this is really quite lovely. It is a shifting of perspective and a chance to see the world through the eyes of a child. In terms of design, it enables us to think about what we are designing and how every intervention provides opportunities for behaviors. I like the concept of re-coding familiar objects through another perspective. There has been subsequent work done with this concept (see Kytta or Ozdemir), but I think the opportunities for this type of thinking about design has many unexplored opportunities.

I recommend reading the original article if you are at all intrigued. My intro is very superficial, and it is a good read.

Gibson, J J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Of Experimental Psychology Human Perception and. Vol. 39.

Heft, Harry. 1988. “AFFORDANCES OF CHILDREN’S ENVIRONMENTS: A FUNCTIONAL APPROACH TO ENVIRONMENTAL DESCRIPTION.” Children’s Environments Quarterly, no. 3: 29.

Kytta, Marketta. 2002. “Affordance of Children’s Environments in the Context of Cities, Small Towns, Suburbs and Rural Villages in Finland and Belarus.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 22 (1-2): 109–23.

Ozdemir, Aydin, Mehmet Corakci, Aydin Özdemir, Mehmet Çorakçi, Aydin Ozdemir, Mehmet Corakci, Aydin Özdemir, and Mehmet Çorakçi. 2010. “Participation in the Greening of Schoolyards in the Ankara Public School System.” Scientific Research and Essays 5 (15): 2065–77.

I was thinking about these ideas as we explored a new park in our city - the new addition of the outdoor park at the "Telus Science Center" in Calgary.