Emotional Design for Traditional Chinese Wayfinding Symbols: A Quantitative Research Through an Eye-Tracking Experiment for Promoting Wayfinders’ Experience

Abstract

The interpretation of way-finding symbols for comprehensive office buildings has a huge impact on visitors’ emotional experience. Due to the modern complexity of comprehensive office buildings, an effective human-centric emotional wayfinding symbol design requires a co-design approach that considers office visitors’ cognition and emotional experience. This study adopted a co-design approach, by which twenty-three participants were asked to design Chinese wayfinding symbols for the interior space of the comprehensive building at Macao University. We investigated the impact of these wayfinding symbols on the efficiency and emotional experience of the wayfinders from China and Macao from the perspective of cognition and emotion. Eye-tracking experiments are used to investigate the difference between the wayfinding design elements and design style produced through the co-design workshop and the existing universal standard wayfinding symbols. Wayfinders’ attention and directionality are verified using First Fixation Duration, Fixation Count and Time to Fixation Duration. Their emotional experience is indexed based on Average Pupil Size. The results showed that traditional Chinese paper folding wayfinding icons are efficient in providing wayfinding guidance. Meanwhile, they increase wayfinders’ pleasure when viewing the icons.