购物中心室内景观设计外文文献英文

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Urban Forestry Received in revised form 24 October 2017 Accepted 30 December 2017 Corresponding author E mail addresses hami tabrizu ac ir A Hami fz fzm F F Moula shdi S B Maulan Urban Forestry for these reasons they tend to identify prominent landmarks such as the water fountain to enable them to fi nd each other easily Armstrong 1995 argued that the design of many lobbies has neglected people s needs in terms of having no place to sit Consequently the author suggested that lobbies be provided with seating places not only adequately but also in various arrangements In addition seating is a part of the landscape furniture and according to Hill 1995 people need certain landscape furniture in every place they use According to Carpenter et al 1975 many successful malls have interior landscape elements especially fl owering plants which are often manipulated and replaced to attract more clients to come to the malls This discloses that the presence of interior landscape in shopping malls isused for many purposes such as providing a comfortable place for people to meet pulling more people to the mall and encouraging them to spend more money and longer time According to Gruen 1973 the trader will always be most successful where his activity is integrated with of the broadest human experiences and urban features This approach is known as shopping towns approach which is dif ferent from the machines forselling approach Gruen 1973 22 The machines for selling approach only encourages people to buy as can be seen in the current situation in most shopping malls in Malaysia par ticularly Kuala Lumpur which seem to operate without considering the needs and preferences of the general public as their customers Previous research in commercial environment has also established that people react positively to and prefer a commercial environment which provides seating places plants and water features Moreover some major interior landscape elements which are considered as im portant by the previous researchers to be incorporated in indoor land scaping include plants as revealed by Coleman 2006 colourful fl owers Armstrong 1995 water features Hamdan and Tajuddin 2000 seating places Armstrong 1995 sculpture or other artworks Coleman 2006 and public clocks Coleman 2006 More accurately Armstrong 1995 revealed that interior public spaces such as the at rium should consist of exotic gardens as well Hamdan and Tajuddin 2000 proposed that these public spaces should have interior gardens and landscaping Here we provided a brief literature review of the logic behind people s preferences for open spaces in order to get a better grasp of the overall picture in relation to these preferences In many studies of landscaping preferences the Information Processing and Aff ordance Theory is the key to understanding the way people perceive the en vironment The fi ndings from previous research has told us that people are prone to reveal certain responses rather than others and they may give positive responses towards some elements in public spaces such as shopping malls Thus in line with the objectives of this study to collect empirical data on people s preferences and help designers in creating user friendly spaces which can be achieved building mainly on the information and aff ordable quality of the environment gathering re levant information on such preferences takes on special importance 3 Methodology 3 1 Questionnaire design In this study the photo questionnaire was used as a part of the survey questionnaire because it has been acknowledged as an effi cient method to obtain participants preferences Many researchers such as Kaplan 2007 and Wolf 2004 employed the content identifying method CIM to understand people s preferences and judgments as a useful procedure to reduce the data and make interpretation all the easier Diff erent people might see or categorize the environment dif ferently the patterns of the people s preferences could still be extracted using the CIM procedure Kaplan and Kaplan 1997 Most studies in landscape preferences employed the CIM making use of the factor re duction technique to group the scenes based on their similarity in re sponse Photo questionnaire is a valid approach to represent the actual environment Gandy and Meitner 2007 Three procedures are in volved in the scene preparation procedure as suggested by Suhardi 2006 Lekagul 2002 and Kaplan 1979 These are considered below 3 2 Scene collection procedure In keeping with one of the objectives of the study i e to identify people s preferences for public spaces at shopping malls it is necessary for the photos used to cover various kinds of interior landscapes found at the public spaces Although the participants were chosen from those residing in Kuala Lumpur not all of the sample photos were taken from the areas in Kuala Lumpur because most shopping malls do not use these interior public spaces in a variety of ways Due to this limitation some of the photos were taken from areas inside and outside of Kuala A Hami et al Urban Forestry Lekagul 2002 The participants were asked to give preference scores based on scores ranging from one to fi ve on the Preference scale 1 that scene is the least preferred to 5 that scene is the most preferred The reliability analysis demonstrated that all the reliability indices for each category were higher than 0 7 as minimum value re commended by Vaus 2002 and any item with a value below 0 3 should be removed from the category 3 5 Research population and sampling The study population consisted of mall users residing in Kuala Lumpur area that were Malaysians and above 18year old as those under 18 years were presumed to be under their parents supervision and therefore parental permissions would have been rendered neces sary However one of the critical issues in this research was the sam pling size because no exact population was stated for the malls Thus a way to solve the problem of sampling was needed for this study The most relevant formula and a suitable solution would be the formula proposed by Mitra and Lankford 1999 cited by Suhardi 2006 This formula signifi cantly prevents error by reducing the sampling error and increasing the confi dence level while at the same time reducing the non sampling error For this study the proposed sample size was 240 to reduce both sampling and non sampling errors Therefore the sam pling error based on the above formula is sampling error Square root of p 1 p proposed sample size e p 1 p sample size 0 5 0 5 240 3 23 The sampling error indicated for this study was 3 23 which was lower than 5 it is thus acceptable if the population is too large Mitra and Lankford 1999 a c f Suhardi 2006 and this has often been used in social science research The systematic random sampling in this study meant that every person who walked out at one identifi ed area near the main entrance of the malls had the same probability to par ticipate in this study In doing so one participant was approached every 15 min at a specifi c location near the main entrance of the malls However if any of the participants refused to cooperate in answering the survey questionnaire the next participant who walked out of the same area was therefore selected Fifteen minute intervals were set because based on the pre test 12min was the maximum time taken for the participant to answer the survey questionnaire and three more minutes for the researcher to check the completed questionnaire Before starting out on the survey the participants were briefed about the purpose of the survey They were also made aware that their involve ment was on a voluntary basis and all the information given would only be used for the purpose of this survey 3 6 Data analysis In order to analyze the data SPSS was used in this research In the fi rst step descriptive analysis was conducted to interpret participants demographic information Mean analysis was run to rank interior landscape dimensions and scenes based on people s preferences to re duce a large number of data into meaningful components to determine preference dimension and to understand the way scenes were grouped in each dimension Exploratory factor analysis was performed using Principal Component Analysis PCA on 32 scenes to analyze the pre ference dimensions In PCA or factor analysis the principle component analysis was used to group the similar scenes together based onloading factor of each scene which is called factor and internal consistency between them should be higher than 0 7 recommended by Vaus 2002 4 Results 4 1 Participants demographic information The participants in this study had various backgrounds in terms of gender age ethnicity monthly income and current housing types Table 1 shows that 240 participants were involved in this study There are 127 males 52 9 and 112 females 46 7 while one participant failed to indicate the gender Most of the participants were in the age group of 18 30 years n 90 37 5 followed by 31 40 years n 66 27 5 41 50 n 40 16 7 and above 50 combined groups of 51 60 and above 60 years old n 44 18 3 Generally the majority of the participants were between 18 50 years old Table 1 The participants were distributed almost equally in terms of race There were 87 Malay 36 3 82 Chinese 34 2 and 79 Indian 29 2 participants Only one participant 0 4 identifi ed his race as other Iban For the duration of time spent in the malls the majority of the participants spent more than four hours for each visit n 111 46 3 Only 12 5 0 participants spent less than one hour in the malls for a visit Table 1 Participants Demographic Information ParticipantsNumberPercentage Total number of participants240100 CategorySub categoryNumberPercentage GenderMale12752 9 Female11246 7 Missing10 4 Age18 30 years9037 5 31 40 years6627 5 41 50 years4016 7 51 60 years3715 4 61 years and above72 9 RaceMalay8736 3 Chinese8234 2 Indian7029 2 Others10 4 Time spent in the mallsLess than 1 h125 0 1 3 h7430 8 3 4 h4317 9 More than 4 h11146 3 A Hami et al Urban Forestry it was only the content of the scenes that played a central role in the pReferences 4 4 Content analysis of each interior landscape dimension Similar physical characteristics qualitative were revealed for the scenes collectively in each dimension in order to identify the under lying factors in terms of content and spatial quality factors that might infl uence the participants visual preference Fig 1 shows the business dimension which includes 12 scenes only three scenes are presented in Fig 1 In terms of content the scenes in this dimension consist of business entities in malls with no water elements in any of the scenes They also do not have centralised public spaces In addition there are no indoor plants in the majority of those scenes For the business di mension in terms of spatial quality the scenes are quite narrow tight and also crammed with business entities Fig 2 shows the second dimension with eight scenes only three scenes are presented in Fig 2 with fi ve more preferred scenes fi tting Table 2 Mean Preference Scores for Each Dimension Name of dimensionMeanStandard deviationContent qualitySpatial quality Green Dimension4 150 641i Have green trees or emphasise on natural elements ii Majority six of eight scenes have seating places iii No business entities i High in coherence ii High in legibility Seating Dimension3 800 616i Have seating places ii Do not emphasise on natural elements iii Majority four of fi ve do not have business entities i High in coherence ii High in legibility iii Low in complexity Business Dimension2 860 893i Have business stall entities ii Does not have water features iii Does not have healthy green plants except one scene with a Christmas tree Not similar in spatial quality Fig 1 The First Dimension Business Dimension Fig 2 The Second Dimension Green Dimension A Hami et al Urban Forestry participants might be able to identify those areas as public areas since they are easily diff erentiated from the private spaces All the scenes scene 14 22 and 2 have clear walkways and distinctive landmarks such as water features and green plants These conditions Fig 3 The Third Dimension Seating Dimension Fig 4 Three Most Preferred Scenes Fig 5 Three Least Preferred Scenes A Hami et al Urban Forestry creating a healthy atmosphere off ering plea sant views and proff ering positive psychological and benefi ts to in dividuals visiting such malls As supported by this study people prefer a mall environment which is coherent and legible Previous research has similarly revealed that people prefer legible landscapes more than the less legible ones Sullivan 1994 In terms of coherence the areas in the scenes are well organised and well ordered while in terms of legibility the scenes have centralised public areas and walkways Legibility was also formed by the vertical ceiling height and horizontal spaciousness wide walkways as well as the openness of the areas Lekagul 2002 also emphasised that spacious and well organised shopping environments are highly preferred Legibility can also increase preference by avoiding a design that blocks eye level view because people react negatively towards such situation in the malls public spaces This is in line with another study where legibility and spaciousness showed important roles in the pre ference for interior open spaces Hami et al 2016 This also supports Kaplan et al 1998 33 who revealed that little obstruction at eye level makes for settings that feel safe and also speak to what people prefer Likewise it lends support to the fi ndings of Sullivan 1994 which stated that people preferred legible places more than places with low rate of legibility The results of the least preferred scenes are somewhat consistent with Lekagul s 2002 fi ndings regarding the characteristics of the least preferred scenes of the modern mall which include narrow walkways and tight spaces in addition to stalls and disorganised areas The most preferred scene puts more emphasis on the natural elements and public seating places while the least preferred scenes emphasise the business entities without public seating places The results of this study are quite consistent with previous studies Kaplan 1985 being a case in point From reviewing 15 preference studies she concluded that the scenes with natural elements had the tendency to form a diff erent group 6 Conclusion The results of this study pointed to the importance of plants seating places and water features in the interior spaces at shopping malls In addition in terms of spatial organisation shopping malls should be coherent and legible with wide public areas wide walkways be open well organised and well structured In this regard there are some im plications that can fl ow from this study as mapped out below 6 1 Interior public spaces at shopping malls should truly be public spaces The interior public spaces of shopping malls should be clearly se parated from the business spaces The elements which have a negative contribution to the prediction of preferences towards greenery such as the business entities need to be eliminated from the indoor spaces in malls Architects should plan a number of public spaces in malls which are frequently used and are accessible People need one interior public space where they can go shopping and simultaneously enjoy the comfortable conditions attendant on the shopping mall 6 2 Interior public spaces must be legible and coherent In terms of spatial quality the most preferred scenes are areas portrayed as being legible and coherent however these two qualities do not exist collectively in the group of the least preferred scenes In order to achieve legibility the designers should divide public spaces and walkways in clear cut ways Also the inclusion of transparent skylights high ceilings and wide areas can increase legibility Elements that somehow obstruct the eye level view might invite fears of onsite crimes such as pick pocketing If big plants were to be used in malls the plant canopy must be managed in such a way as to avoid obstructing the view A suggestion would be to use palm trees in the indoor setting as they do not involve spreading canopy Besides legibility in order to boost coherence the interior landscape elements must be well organised Managers should also change their perception and understanding of public spaces not solely think of in creasing their profi t margins by maximizing the business area in blunt and direct ways Future managers need to be well educated in these areas familiarized with important principles including the fact that they are not dealing with robots or machines but with humans who have special needs and preferences 6 3 Proposed characteristics of interior public spaces at shopping malls mall as a township In creating public spaces what is required is the addition of various non retail functions including social and cultural events as well as relaxation and artistic elements in a mall The shopping town ap proach requires township characteristics inside the malls to create various types of interior garden landscapes based on people s cultures This involves bringing inside the malls elements like rivers or waterfalls with dynamic water fl ows and fountains public libraries gardens and parks Indoor mall spaces must be designed to refl ect and pander to the most preferred characteristics or dimensions the green feature The designers should always think about how to create a sense of commu nity and how to bring local or national identities inside the public spaces These present a great challenge for all mall designers and ar chitects necessitating their need to think plan carefully and introduce new elements and amenities to the malls In light of all this it seems A Hami et al Urban Forestry Urban Greening 30 2018 1 7 6 that research on people s needs and preferences towards interior public spaces at malls should remain a continuous proces