Grammatical design and crowd behaviour: A study of factors that influence human movement in urban spaces

Abstract

Crowd behaviour in traffic and emergency situations has been recorded and documented since the early 1990s, often using digital representations of balls as an indicator of mass and movement. This paper reports the investigation of the factors that influence human movement in urban spaces and visualises the impact on human movements of changes to an urban design space. Using an agent-oriented approach is the common method for investigating the simulation of crowd behaviour. The relation of grammatical design to crowd behaviour is proposed as an important research area. This area developed since the technology for the advanced design visualisation of avatars or animated characters became available. The authors of the software used in Lord of the Rings and other well-known crowd movies have contributed to knowledge of the key issues in crowd behaviour in particular contexts and general situations. This paper relates experiments in teaching grammatical approaches to architectural design with digital media as a tool with three different implementations: a cafe, restaurant and gallery. Using a variety of design visualisation techniques gives different understandings of the use of a design space. By representing human movement in a design space in more complex visualisations we see more alternatives for better design more readily. Using notions of grammar, contingency and play to explore simple changes in design, the resulting crowd animations present an insightful early research stage experiment with the theories and models of crowd behaviour.