DEVELOPMENT OF PERCEPTUAL WAYFINDING FRAMEWORK FOR HOSPITAL ENVIRONMENT IN NORTH CENTRAL NIGERIA

Abstract

Wayfinding refers to the task of a person navigating unfamiliar environment from a known location to an unknown location for a purpose with the goal to reach a desired destination. In large complex buildings such as teaching hospitals, wayfinding becomes a challenge to unfamiliar users which results to miss of medical appointments, anxiety, stress, getting lost, frustration, and even death in emergency situations. Hence, the study becomes pertinent in view of the paucity of study of the phenomenon in the study area. The purpose of this study was to investigate wayfinding in teaching hospitals in north central Nigeria with a view to develop a perceptual wayfinding framework. The study was carried out to determine the level of user-friendliness the hospital environment had to unfamiliar users for wayfinding. As such, the objectives of the research were to examine users’ perception of wayfinding; establish the critical factors that influence the ease of wayfinding in hospital buildings, and the effectiveness of hospital design in relation to wayfinding performance. Mixed method approach was used as the methodology where four hospitals in the north central Nigeria were evaluated using quantitative and qualitative data. Consequently, cross sectional survey questionnaire was employed as instruments for collecting quantitative data while interview and observation techniques were used for collecting qualitative data. The sample size for the questionnaire survey was 400 participants, 56 respondents for the interview, and 16 participants were observed for wayfinding in the hospitals. The data were analysed using descriptive, inferential, content and domain analyses. The main research findings revealed that complex building configuration was a challenge to unfamiliar users in finding destinations with ease in the hospital environments. In addition, the research established seven critical factors that significantly predict wayfinding in the hospitals. These factors and their factor loadings include landmarks (0.854) clearly defined circulation spaces (0.812), route intersection (0.739), visual accessibility (0.655), verbal direction (0.533) building layout complexity (0.468), and signage (0.412) which are above the standard recommended threshold of 0.4. This implies that professionals (architects, urban designers and wayfinding designers) and policy makers should consider these factors that influence the environmental legibility of the hospitals in the designs of wayfinding systems. Based on the research findings, the study developed a perceptual wayfinding framework for hospitals in north central Nigeria. In the framework, the concepts of affordance and information needs were used to describe the visual perception of environmental cues. Accordingly, visual perception is important to cue-searching in the built environment, suggesting that visual ergonomics should be a significant feature to consider in spatial wayfinding designs. Finally, it was recommended that government policy on hospital designs should be of simple building layout, each zone should have clearly defined circulation space, and with each space differently identified. In that way, cue searching and selection becomes easy for successful wayfinding.