You Are Here by Colin Ellard

You Are Here by Colin Ellard

Author:Colin Ellard [Ellard, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-53042-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-09-01T04:00:00+00:00


Understanding how our spatial cognition influences how we move and where we rest can often be used to exert a kind of social control. Many examples of this use of spatial design principles can be found in commercial buildings such as supermarkets, department stores, and shopping malls.5 In department stores, different sections can be placed as if to set the stage for a kind of story in which the shopper plays the starring role. Cosmetics are placed carefully near other adornments, such as jewelry and purses. Men’s sportswear is kept respectfully apart from the tiny black dresses women wear to the fanciest parties.

The placement and design of food courts are also carefully managed to exert control over behavior. Unlike department stores, where mall owners hope that customers will linger for as long as possible with wallets in hand, food courts are designed to discourage lingering. Such areas are usually very open. Enclosing walls, and the refuge they offer, are avoided by arranging wide aisles around the outside of the seating area that are designed to draw people to the service counters. Food courts are brightly lit, often with skylights and high ceilings. Tables are arranged in such a way as to discourage groups of diners any larger than two. The effect, very much like trying to have lunch in the middle of an overdone foyer in a suburban McMansion, is artfully contrived to encourage people to slap down their money, wolf down their food, and plunge themselves back into the shopping fray.6 Perhaps a more apt metaphor would be to imagine primitive Homo sapiens sitting down for a nice lunch in the middle of a wide open stretch of savannah. He would undoubtedly run a great risk of becoming lunch, rather than consuming it, so would be unlikely to linger for dessert.

Shoppers might be corralled out of food courts and into highend jewelry sections by the subtle manipulations of space, but other contexts where the explicit use of the size and shape of space to exert social control on our behavior are even more extreme. In the gigantic gambling palaces of Las Vegas or Monte Carlo, shrewd designers understand that the placement of each hallway, crap table, or slot machine can influence the amount of money taken in by the casino.

Currently, there are two main theories about the best way to organize the space inside a casino in order to more quickly liberate the cash hiding in the wallets of visitors. One influential set of studies, carried out by longtime casino consultant Bill Friedman, emphasizes that the best way to maximize the yield of a casino is to focus the attention of visitors on the gambling equipment itself, especially the slot machines. To encourage this laser-beam focus, Friedman encourages the use of low ceilings, narrow aisles, and tight spaces so that the visitor is surrounded on all sides by the flashing lights and ringing bells of the slots. In addition, Friedman encourages spatial designs that explicitly work against good wayfinding—this is one context in which low spatial intelligibility would be considered a business asset.



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