Pilot Method of Using Social Media Data to Map the Observation Patterns: Presenting Viewing Points and Being Viewed in Seattle Freeway Park

Yang Song (North Dakota State University)

Social media have been a huge, efficient, and ever-growing source for environmental design researchers to better understand public opinions and public space usage. Nevertheless, compared with the textual, temporal, and geographical information that were utilized extensively in generating new environment design knowledge, the huge amount of pictorial data from social media have rarely been used. In contrast, the conventional research methods on human observation (such as survey and experiment) usually collect relatively small amount of material sampled on-site during a limited time frame, and usually in an interruptive manner.

This study marks a preliminary effort of using social media data to map human’s observation patterns in a public space. Taking the Seattle Freeway Park as an example, 3414 Instagram posts from 2035 users for three years (2015-2017) were mined and categorized. The key questions of this study are: where were the most frequent observation points and where were the most viewed areas in the park? And, why? To answer these questions, the researchers developed an analytic procedure to visualize each posted photographs as individual fan shapes on the park master plan, which indicate the standing point the users took Instagram photos, the direction the photo toward, and observed areas. The accumulative patterns of these fan shapes demonstrate the distribution of the observation point and viewed area. By reading the images that reflect the most popular angles and areas, and checking the design features of these areas, a series of site design guidelines were summarised. The result of this project provides new insights to better program future open space projects, and more convincingly visualize and evaluate the merits of open spaces for architects, landscape architects and planners. Investors could add an angle to conduct the post occupancy evaluation; and city managers could improve the monitoring of multiple open space sites.