A New Method of Random Environmental Walking for Assessing Behavioral Preferences for Different Lighting Applications

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.

Improved Usability of Pedestrian Environments After Dark for People with Vision Impairment: an Intervention Study

“…An additional knowledge gap relates to the impact of LED lighting, which has only been tested on the general population [43], mostly in laboratory environments [45,48]. Additionally, only a few studies have taken users' perceptions and experiences of the new light sources into account [49]. Thus, to the best of the authors' knowledge, no studies on the impact of different outdoor lighting systems on people with vision impairment have been performed in real urban settings.…”

Linking nighttime outdoor lighting attributes to pedestrians' feeling of safety: An interactive survey approach

“…Studies focusing on outdoor lighting constitute a distinct strand of research [7,12,25,26], but they are relatively scarce and entail various limitations. Most of these studies are based on "self-report" questionnaires, which are subjects to various biases and limitations, such as inefficient management of information on measurement time and location during the assessments [27].…”

“…PSL is currently designed according to international, national or local standards, such as EN 13201 [ 11 ]. However, since the association between the above-mentioned lighting attributes and pedestrians’ FoS has not been sufficiently studied [ 1 , 12 ], it is not clear enough how well do the abovementioned standards, albeit technically efficient, contribute to FoS. Moreover, human perceptions of PSL attributes may be influenced by socio-demographic characteristics and may vary according to individual, locational, environmental and temporal circumstances.…”

“…Using "paper & pencil" technique to record PSL assessments outdoor after-dark may also pose difficulties, especially to the elderly and visually impaired [ 28 ]. Consequently, some respondents may prefer to record their assessments later on, in better visual conditions, which may introduce uncontrolled errors, resulting from memory limitations [ 12 ].…”

AN ASSESSMENT OF USER PREFERENCE IN ARTIFICIAL PATHWAY LIGHTING IN URBAN PARKS; Cases from Greater Colombo region

“…These include not only large -scale structures, but also small-scale elements in the urban context such as urban greenery, adequate lighting, etc. Therefore, it is important to be fully aware of how elements of such small-scale affect and improve the user experience (Patching, Rahm, Jansson, & Johansson, 2017). Artificial lighting is a major contributing factor towards the successful design of urban parks, which in turn can enrich the park's social, health, economic and environmental benefits.…”