• Proceedings of the Korea Society of Design Studies Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.100-101
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• 2005

• Archives of design research
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• v.19 no.5 s.67
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• pp.351-362
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• 2006

Currently, finding one's way in the underground spaces associated with subway stations in large cities is becoming a serious problem, and an environment that facilitates wayfinding is becoming more important. This study investigated interior treatments that function as visual cues in the subway stations of Seoul, Tokyo, and Taipei in order to develop design guidelines that would improve the place-cognition environment. A theoretical study has shown that there are three categories of visual cue for place cognition: marked trails, regional differentiation, and landmarks. The case study showed that marked trails involve treatments like vertical markers, confrontational positioning, and subway color codes. Regional differentiation involves patterns on the floors and walls, and accent colors on the walls and columns. Landmarks include treatments such as super graphics, symbolic features, artistic decoration and special lights. In the cases of Seoul, marked trails and regional differentiation were predominant. In addition, the Olympic symbol 'Hodori' and the ancient Korean character "Hunminjungeum" were used as landmarks. In the cases of Tokyo, regional differentiation predominated over marked trails because of the complexity of the spatial structure and subway line connection system. In the cases of Taipei, simple, unified images predominated, and there was minimal dependence on marked trails and landmarks. The need for regional differentiation was weak, because the stations studied have open structures that guarantee an open field of view. The results of this research could be used as design guidelines, after further experimental verification, that would help to improve the public environment in terms of wayfinding.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.7
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• pp.12-20
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• 2015

The subway is one of the representative urban public transportation systems. Since its being opened in 1974, the Seoul Subway has been continually extended, and new lines are being added in the metropolitan and outskirt areas, even at present. As a result, the numbers of transfer stations and transfer sections have been significantly increased, making the usage of the subway system more and more complicated. In the transfer stations with big floating population and overlapped flows of traffic in the subway, passengers want their movements to be more precise and faster, without taking the wrong trains by mistake. Therefore, the visual information system for the subway inside the stations is extremely important. At the same time, the visual information system is required to be easy to understand and use, even if the passengers do not have previous experience of using the subway. In this research we studied the problems existing in the visual information system which is currently working in the subway system, and suggest the direction of the improvement of the subway service based on our studies. This research was mainly performed at Sindorim Station, one of the busiest stations in Seoul Subway with huge floating population and complex transfer sections. The purpose of this research is the investigation of behavioral and recognitive characteristics of passengers in the transfer sections through preceding research and qualitative analysis, to draw the direction for future improvement of the current system and suggest the improved experience of using the subway system.