Everyone has four different spaces, intimate, personal, Social and Public (shown in image above). Personal space – “an area with invisible boundaries surrounding a person’s body into which intruders may not come.” Robert Sommer. Therefore everyone is like being wrapped around by a bubble (shown in the image above.) The average distance or the radius of personal spaces is around 60cm; this number differs from person to person. Ones personal space is influenced by gender, size, personality, mood and age. When personal spaces are invaded, this will bring a level of uncomfortable feeling to the one being invaded. Sometimes this unwanted feeling cannot be escaped, especially in public spaces of the highly dense cities. Can designs help to resolve or ease this unwanted feeling?
Hitting into stranger’s shoulders constantly happens on the streets of Hong Kong, especially during the public holidays (shown in the image below.) No Hong Kongers can escape from it when they walk on the pedestrian walk way. What can design do to help fewer invasions of personal spaces? For example, Planners could Separate the direction of traffic to onward on one side and downward on the other, or widening the pedestrian walkway to allow ones to evade each other.
From my experiences, lifts in Hong Kong can get very packed sometimes. I used to get quite uncomfortable standing inches away from strangers from all front. What if travelling between floors could be done without lifts? Slides could be installed instead of lifts, as they only allow one person to travel on per time (shown in the image above.) While peoples personal space won’t be invaded and also making the journey a fun experience.
The orientation of sitting can also determine ones level of comfort. As the results from the observation carried out from the Robert Gifford book show, people seems to prefer sitting back to back from strangers, then sitting side by side to strangers.) In public spaces such as the underground train, where row seats are applied (shown in the images above), designers could consider back to back sitting arrangements as this will give a better level of comfort due to the back to back orientation, and less interaction between ones personal space.
Having travelled to a lot of different airports, I can’t help notice transit passengers sleeping on the seats of the airport. Most of the time, I tend not to seat in the same row as them or even not sit at all. With the installation of sleep boxes, passengers don’t have to take up the whole row of seats while they are sleeping (the image above shows the layout of the Dubai airport with sleep boxes installed.)
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