Design, cognition behaviour: usability in the built environment
This speculative research proposal offers a user centred perspective on AgentBased Models for architectural/urban usability studies. As arbitrary decisions are typically made to model some variables over others, Agent Based Models often miss the patterns and biases of human spatial behaviour long known in Spatial Cognition literature. When meaningful variables are included in the model, they are often assumed to be normally, or unimodally distributed. As a plethora of empirical studies have shown, human behaviour is neither logical, nor random, and very rarely optimal. This proposal presents the problem in detail and offers some avenues for further development, including the ideas for validation of the potential cognitively biased agent based models.