Reveal the Urban Waterfront Visiting Experiences By mapping the views and Attractions through Instagram Data

Bo Zhang (Oklahoma State University)

The experiential qualities such as aesthetic characteristics, spatial structures, and sensory stimulations play an important role in designed environments. To design an effective open space, it is essential to understand how a public space project was used and experienced by the users, and what the outdoor environment meant. Meanwhile, Instagram as a fast-growing social media include a massive quantity of photo data on public space usage. Conventional Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) research examined the user experiences by conducting surveys, on-site observations, behavior mappings, etc, few studies have used social media data like Instagram. This project aims to reveal the visiting experiences by mapping and analyzing views and attractions through Instagram Data. Taking the Seattle Olympic Park as an example, 12994 Instagram posts from 8815 users in 2017 were mined and formatted to answer the research questions of “what views visitors liked” and “where visitors stayed”. An analytic method for representing views and standing points from Instagram photos was developed using customized design computing tools Grasshopper and Python. The results include heat maps visualizing the accumulative frequency of photo content and vector field maps showing the viewing direction additions for each 10 square feet base grid. These analyses were also broken down to seasons, so we could compare seasonal patterns throughout the year. The aggregate of our results will gain insights on how visitors view and interact with a large water body and urban skyline, as well as design recommendations on circulation organization, spatial dimensions, program deployment, and site facilities. Since all findings are originated from data with large participants and long time range, this project will provide a new perspective on Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) and visual research about urban waterfront development.