Designing for crowd well-being

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of crowd well-being and the needs for sustaining it. Crowd well-being can be interpreted as crowd members’ evaluations on their emotional reactions, moods and judgments they form about their satisfactions, goals or needs fulfillment in a crowded situation according to the definition of subjective well-being by Diener and his colleagues. Higher level needs, i.e. relatedness and autonomy in Sheldon’s two-level hierarchy are essential to the enhancement of crowd well-being when safety is guaranteed. Needs for safety become prominent in case of emergencies. Furthermore, it investigates three representative crowd management designs and strategies and how they fulfill the needs of crowd members through ten crowd expert interviews. We conclude that the current strategies and designs mostly focus on the effortful planning and preparation for the potentially unsafe situations, which tend to be coercive instead of fully respect crowd members’ autonomy. A number of technologies are applied to monitor the crowd behaviors externally due to the security concerns rather than approach and assess them locally, understand their needs and provide real-time feedbacks to support their well-being. We suggest that future designs should allow the measuring to go into the crowds and place an emphasis on improving crowd members’ higher level needs on the premise of security.