Sürdürülebilir Yeşil Kampüs Koleksiyonu / Sustainable Green Campus Collection
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11147/7755
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Article Citation - WoS: 3Citation - Scopus: 8Way-Finding Strategies of Blind Persons in Urban Scale(John Wiley and Sons Inc., 2017) Kan Kılıç, Didem; Doğan, FehmiThe aim of this study was to determine whether urban environments with different prominent sensory inputs have an impact on the way-finding strategies of blind people and to identify these impacts, where applicable. We specifically investigated how blind people use their senses to compensate for the lack of visual information and how the priority of senses changes according to the urban context. The participants of the study consisted of nine congenitally blind individuals and the study took place in two urban settings: a dense urban district, Kemeralti district in İzmir; and an urban park, the İzmir Fair Park. During the learning phase, a first trial along the selected routes was conducted for each participant individually along with one of the researchers. In the test phase, the participants were requested to re-walk the route and verbally report the environmental cues they attended to. The participants’ verbal reports were recorded and transcripts of the recordings were coded according to the environmental sensory inputs. In addition, the short-term memory of each participant was also evaluated. The results show that the characteristics of the urban environment seem to have an impact on way-finding strategies of blind individuals. It was found that the sound of the city and the echo from the environment are the most important factors for blind participants in the dense urban environment. Environmental boundaries provided echoes and gave a sense of enclosure that helped them orient themselves, whereas, in the park environment, the sense of enclosure was not enhanced due to a lack of boundaries in the environment.Doctoral Thesis Non-Visual Aspects of Spatial Knowledge: Wayfinding Behavior of Visually Impaired People in Complex Urban Environments(İzmir Institute of Technology, 2016) Kan Kılıç, Didem; Doğan, FehmiEverybody perceive space multi-dimensionally however blind people are more conscientious of the non-visual constituents of space. Although there is an extensive amount of research on mobility, perception, and way-finding of blind people, there has been fewer work to show which specific aspects of built environment they focus on and they use as cues in the way they relate to their urban environment. Therefore, this study focuses on the senses of blind individuals during their way-finding process in urban contexts. Two case studies in İzmir, Turkey and Lisbon, Portugal were conducted in large-scale urban contexts. The case study in İzmir highlights the holistic and multi-dimensional perception of space by asking 9 congenitally blind participants to mark those places that they find particularly important in Kemeralti and İzmir Fair Park by verbally describing the features in the environment they attend to. It was found that auditory information was the most used environmental cues and a feeling of enclosure is the most important environmental feature during way-finding. The second case study in Lisbon was conducted with 5 congenitally blind participants to understand the strategies of congenitally blind participants with a focus on whether sounds from the environment are of primary importance for blind individuals. The most important finding is that increased familiarity with the environment, the better way-finding strategies blind individuals have. This study highlights multi-dimensional sensory experience of urban environments and non-visual aspects of spatial perception.