Human Conceptions of Spaces: Implications for Geographic Information Systems1

The way people conceptualize space is an important consideration for the design of geographic information systems, because a better match with peopleÕs thinking is expected to lead to easier-touse information systems. Everyday space, the basis to geographic information systems (GISs), has been characterized in the literature as being either small-scale (from table-top to room-size spaces) or large-scale (inside-of-building spaces to city-size space). While this dichotomy of space is grounded in the view from psychology that peopleÕs perception of space, spatial cognition, and spatial behavior are experience-based, it is in contrast to current GISs, which enable us to interact with large-scale spaces as though they were small-scale or manipulable. We analyze different approaches to characterizing spaces and propose a unified view in which space is based on the physical properties of manipulability, locomotion, and size of space. Within the structure of our framework, we distinguish six types of spaces: manipulable object space (smaller than the human body), non-manipulable object space (greater than the human body, but less than the size of a building), environmental space (from inside building spaces to city-size spaces), geographic space (state, country, and continent-size spaces), panoramic space (spaces perceived via scanning the landscape), and map space. Such a categorization is an important part of Naive Geography, a set of theories of how people intuitively or spontaneously conceptualize geographic space and time, because it has implications for various theoretical and methodological questions concerning the design and use of spatial information tools. Of particular concern is the design of effective spatial information tools that lead to better communication.