Episode 87: Ren Yee – The Cognitive Experience of a Transit User

This episode of the Mpact Podcast features a conversation with architect and urban designer Renn Yee, from UN Studio in Amsterdam. We sat down with him after a session at last fall’s Mpact Transit + Community conference in Philadelphia, where he was part of a session called Using Human Behavior to Inform Transit Decisions.

On the podcast, he talks about using cognitive mapping tools to understand how people experience transit spaces, from stations to the surrounding cityscape. Where do people make mistakes? How much do they look at their phones and why? How does it feel to be in a wheelchair moving through transit spaces? And how can this information lead to better design?

As always, we start with a little background about Ren Yee –  bicycle commuting in Amsterdam, green spaces in cities – then get into what he and others are learning from using cognitive tools and human-centered design for transit spaces. Along the way, we’ll encounter such terms as mind wandering, the horn effect, salient bias and confirmation bias. And hear how using virtual reality can be a “more scalable methodology” for understanding how people use spaces before designing them even begins.

“So coming back to this idea of understanding the user from the cognitive lens and cognitive lens means also the way they perceive information, the way they perceive their stage of their travel down to the way they perceive travel-related information or sense of direction, navigation, and wayfinding, down to what they remember and then what actions do they take. So these kinds of methodologies of understanding user are something that we’re very excited with.” — Ren Yee