Personal Space Goes Online

Stanford researchers have employed innovative and surprising techniques to better understand what the New York Times describes as "that invisible force field around your body": personal space. People's personal space "needs" have grown more acute with "the population in the United States climbing above 300 million, urban corridors becoming denser and people with wealth searching for new ways to separate themselves from the masses." A new platform for the study of personal space has emerged with the Internet: online cyber-worlds such as Second Life. In a paper to be published in CyberPsychology & Behavior, scientists "found that virtual environments may be another platform to study physical social interaction. It specifically found that the unwritten rules of personal space are so powerful, people even impose them on their cyber selves."

Proxemics, or the study of individuals' space-related interactions, has important and wide-ranging consequences: "On a larger scale, it helps developers, urban planners and executives in various industries understand how people move through public spaces, how they shop, even what type of restaurants they find most comfortable."

  

Mary Sit, November 21, 2006

Very interesting post - I read the NYT piece you linked to. I work for a mass transit agency and am its newly hired full-time blogger. I'm curious - have there been any studies about personal space on buses and trains? Do industrial designers take this into account when designing buses and trains? How do they figure out how many people they can pack on a train, for example? So many feet/person for SRO?

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