Safety in passenger ships: The influence of environmental design characteristics on people's perception of safety Markus Ahola a, * , Ruth Mugge b a Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture/School of Engineering, PO Box 12200, FI-00076 Aalto, Finland b Delft University of Technology, Department of Product Innovation Management, Landbergstraat 15, 2628 CE Delft, The Netherlands article info Article history: Received 14 April 2015 Received in revised form 15 June 2016 Accepted 31 July 2016 Keywords: Perception Safety Architectural design Environmental design abstract Although objective safety is a widely studied topic in ergonomics, subjective safety has received far less research attention. Nevertheless, most of human decision-making and behavior depends on how we perceive our environment. This study investigates the effects of various environmental design charac- teristics on people's safety perception in a passenger ship context. Five different environmental design characteristics were manipulated to increase the openness of the space or to create more clear navi- gation, resulting in 20 different cabin corridors for a passenger ship. Ninety-seven respondents were asked to rate these corridors on the perceived safety in an experiment. The results showed that people feel more safe when the corridors have a curved ceiling, when the walls do not have a split-level design, and when there is a view to the outside. Designers can use these insights when designing future environments. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Safety is a critical determinant for people's quality of life (Cummins, 1996; Stamps, 2010; Van Rijswijk et al., 2016), and much research has been devoted to create safer products (e.g., Benedyk and Minister, 1998; Min et al., 2012; Wilson, 1984) and environ- ments (e.g., Duarte et al., 2011; Hsiao et al., 2013; Stamps, 2005a,b; Vilar et al., 2013), such as cruise ships (Papanikolau, 2009). How- ever, when experiencing environments in daily life, people are generally hardly able to effectively evaluate the objective safety level of their environment (Ahola et al., 2014; Campbell et al., 1976). Instead, people often rely on their perceptions to ascertain an en- vironment's safety. Consequently, it is important to go beyond objective safety (‘being safe’) by uncovering the factors that influ- ence whether people will ‘feel safe’ (Van Rijswijk et al., 2016). People need to feel safe before they can feel comfortable and experience other positive emotions, such as enjoyment (Epstein, 1990; Sheldon et al., 2001). As a consequence, positively influ- encing people's safety perceptions is especially critical for envi- ronments with entertaining purposes, such as cruise ships. Cruise ship operators transport passengers by sea for pleasure, and passengers' comfort is one of their main priorities (Yarnal and Kerstetter, 2005). Thus, it is important to understand how safety perceptions are evoked to minimize uncomfortable feelings in or- der to guarantee passengers' enjoyment of the cruise experience (Baker, 2013). One way to evoke more positive safety perceptions is through a successful environmental design. In this respect, various scholars have proposed that designers 1 need to consider safety perceptions in the design process (Ahola et al., 2014, Kim et al., 2004; Vilar et al., 2013; Williamson et al., 1997). However, evidence exists that it can be challenging to design cruise ships that ‘feel safe’. First of all, prior research has demonstrated that significant differences exist be- tween users and designers with respect to their perceptions of design objects, which makes the transfer of consumer needs into technical and design specifications challenging (Blijlevens et al., 2009; Hsu et al., 2000). Second, designing passenger ships is a complex design process with many conflicting requirements (e.g., technical demands caused by moving on water, berth capacity, safety regulations, comfort). Third, in the study of Ahola et al. (2014), it was identified that shallow and narrow cabin corridors of the passenger ship have a negative influence on passengers' * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: markus.ahola@aalto.fi (M. Ahola), r.mugge@tudelft.nl (R. Mugge). 1 With the term designer, we mean different experts that are involved in the interior design of a ship, such as industrial designers, architects, and ship engineers. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Applied Ergonomics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apergo http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2016.07.021 0003-6870/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Applied Ergonomics 59 (2017) 143e152