The Problem with Building Usability

THE PROBLEM WITHBUILDING USABILITY

(one of many)

+ a super-short crash course in Space Syntax

Jakub KrukarNorthumbria University, Newcastle, UK

[email protected]

Imagine a room.

And another room, next to it. One more…Actually, just build a house in your mind.

Done? Cool, now mentally zoom out.Look at it from the top, look at its floor plan.

You quite probably ended up with something similar to this...

source: www.floorplanner.com

I know, I know - not exactly the same shape, not exactly the same size. But I bet the main idea is similar - a hallway, a centrally located living room, a kitchen connected only to the living room or to the hallway, etc.

The theory of Space Syntax looks at layouts emphasising relations between spaces, not its 'visible' properties, such as size or colour. If you ask a rich guy and a poor guy to design a house for themselves, the size will be different, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms will vary.

BUT they'll both have a very similar idea of what a house is:where each of its parts should be located relative to the other parts. None of them would put a toilet in the centre of the house with 4 entrances connecting to it. Have you?

So let me just visualise these relations.Again, that's our layout:

Let's divide it into sub-spaces: sub-spaces in which every person is able to see every other person occupying the same sub-space. The reason for this is that the concept of a 'room' can be unclear sometimes and we need a more 'objective' concept. We'll call it a convex space:

And now we need to turn this into a graph. So each space is a node and every connection between any two spaces that can be walked by a human is a link:

Take the background away:

And justify the graph:

Got it!

That's the representation of the connections between spaces. The reason why it's 'better' compared to a regular plan is that it's independent of all those things that vary from house to house (like the size of your bedroom) but allows us to catch any repeatable patterns occurring in many different buildings (such as the living room in the centre of it all).

We all have a more or less similar idea of what a 'house', a 'hospital' or a 'school' should look like. So you and me, we both EXPECT to have a number of separate bedrooms in a house, not all connected to each other (that would be a funny house, right?).In Human-Computer Interaction, these ideas about how things should look and work like are called 'mental models'.

But in an art gallery, for example, rooms often can be connected to each other, allowing you to pass through intermediate rooms without going back to a corridor. And no one seems to be surprised about it!

That's because the mental model of spatial relations you're using is context-dependant and will vary between places.

source: this and the following

images are fromB.Hillier & J.Hanson -

The Social Logic of Space

And now the cool bit… (yeah, I think it really is cool!)

Space syntax is also used in archeology.

Why?Because as it happens, these mental models can be compared

not only between contexts, but also between cultures.

And if we use our mental models to construct spaces(like an architect designing houses - he uses the 'common idea of a house')it means our architecture reflects those mental models.

"It is this ordering of space that is the purpose of building, not the physical object itself. The physical object is the means to the end. In

this sense, buildings are not what they seem. [...] Buildings are not just objects, but transformations of space through objects."

B.Hillier & J.Hanson - The Social Logic of Space

When looking at cit ies which emerged 'naturally' - from being a small village, through a town - it may seem some of them look very chaotic.

Both on a map and from the viewpoint of a street.

BUT when we measure the relations between spaces they happen to be very regular, repeatable and equal for everyone(e.g. every house might have an access to the main street which is not a cul-de-sac, a backyard garden, and be surrounded by 3 neighbours).

Sizes and shapes of these places differ (that's what makes it look

chaotic) but the main rules stay the same. So there's a hidden order in this natural chaos - and we could assume that's our 'original' mental model here.

Look at gecekondus - illegal settlements in Turkey which evolved with no urban planning whatsoever...

source: wikipedia

Try entering one of their small, curvy streets and you instantly get lost. But to the people living there, who built these houses and these streets it's all natural and somehow they never get lost.A Turkish friend even told me he never knows how to get to a place but he always finds it. Ask him to explain the route though and he'll have no idea.

source: http://inuraistanbul2009.wordpress.com/

If this is the 'natural order' we'd like to replicate and enhance, it looks quite complicated, doesn't it?

source: wikipedia

So now, how can this poor, humble (khe, khe:) architect or urban planner figure out what people want or what would fit their needs? Well - that's a common issue in user-centered design - you're trying to discover their implicit mental models, behaviour patterns and adjust or fit your work into that...

In the architectural/urban context, if it's not done right, that's when we get lost in a place - because we've been EXPECTING something else in here. Maybe that's when a home doesn't feel 'homely' or when a neighbourhood turns into slums, too?

On the one hand, from this perspective, primitive settlements reflecting natural patterns of use seem to work pretty well... In which case maybe a top-down design is doomed even before the first line in AutoCad is drawn?

On the other hand, all those researchers, architects and designers do what they do for a living only because they believe that something can actually be fixed. That planned intervention can be (yet not always is) better than leaving things to take their own course. But then - what do we really want to achieve through these adjustments? And how do we decide which of the possible solutions are better than the others?

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This presentation was initially written for the guys fromHumans In Design. Check out their related blog post.

Thanks to Tristan Cook and Prof. Ruth Conroy Dalton for their comments.