Analyzing Human Visual Perception of Streetscape Elements through Taxonomic Diagrams

Abstract

Any element is made of several sub elements and they have complex connections on the physical world. It shows a hierarchy. The complexity caused due to this hierarchical structure of variety and connections is called structural hierarchical complexity. However, in the visual world, these physical elements will be perceived based on their visual qualities like color, shapes, size, and distance. During the course of visual perception, some elements will be highlighted while some elements will be suppressed. Visual perception has an order of viewing objects. This order of visual perception creates invisible connections among the viewing objects and it leads to have an invisible hierarchical structure of perception. This phenomenon can be explained as structural hierarchical visual perception. Therefore, this research was carried out with the objective of representing this structural hierarchical visual perception as diagrams to show these invisible connections among visual elements in human perception. To achieve this objective, the Gestalt's explanation on figure and background classification was applied. For this analysis, a survey was carried out with 60 subjects. Subjects were asked to travel along 100 streetscapes in Colombo District while explaining the most eye catching elements in an orderly way. The explanations were recorded as video clips. Later those video clips were analyzed and the subjects' explanations were arranged as taxonomic diagrams to display order of visual perception by each subject. The ordering of visual elements by sixty subjects for different streetscapes displayed unique patterns such as residential streetscapes resulted one common pattern and this pattern was different from the viewing pattern of commercial streetscapes. Thus the structural hierarchical visual perception for different streetscapes was different to each streetscape type. The taxonomic diagrams drawn to different streetscape types were varied in their lengths and the widths attesting this difference in visual perception in varied streetscape types. Thus by analyzing taxonomic diagrams, it was very straightforward to understand the structural hierarchical visual complexity on different streetscape types. Thus taxonomic diagrams are a best representation of structural hierarchical visual perception as well as the structural hierarchical complexity.