A Mobile Application as an Unobtrusive Tool for Behavioural Mapping in Public Spaces

In any man-made environment, discrepancies may exist between the intent of its design and how it is actually used. Behaviour mapping allows researchers to determine how participants use a designed space by recording participant behaviours and/or tracking their movement within the space itself. Not only the participants’ movements, other characteristics referring to users (e.g. age, gender, cultural background) and variety of circumstantial factors -including the time of a day, the day of the week, the season or weather conditions - may have a dramatic impact on the types of participant behaviours displayed. This paper highlights a new unobtrusive tool for helping behaviour mapping to easily identify patterns of engagements, gather suggestions and environmental factors within public spaces. The tool mainly consists of a smartphone application (app) and a web service. The app, on one hand tracks the way participants use the space, allowing them to get contextual information, answer contextual questions, and to send augmented reality suggestions or complaints. On the other, the web monitors the way participants use the space allowing to visualize participants’ suggestions, answers, or their traces. The tool features and its research ability have been discussed as well as some lessons are expected to be drawn towards building a more participatory and collaborative processes of planning, designing, maintaining and monitoring of urban spaces.