In New York, we see benches everywhere. While it is true that benches allow many people to sit on them at the same time, would people want to sit next to a stranger? Or would they intentionally sit apart from strangers? How far would they want to sit from you?
In order to answer these questions, I selected a bench located at the exit of a subway station as well as the exit of a supermarket to track how many people would be sitting there in 10 minutes. To get a better count of the distance between people, I labeled all seats on this bench.
To ensure privacy, I chose to watch this little area through my apartment’s window.
During my observations, I recorded exactly which numbered seats people would sit during the observation period and calculated their distances with strangers.For example, if A sits at position 1 and B sits at position 2 then their distance is 0, but if B sits at position 4 then the distance is 2.
From the results, we can see that no one chose to sit next to someone else during observation periods. People generally preferred to sit 3 or 4 seats away from strangers.
Lots of interesting insights can be gained by looking at people’s habits regarding sitting on that bench. From this observation, the results show that “people don’t like to sit next to each other”, which leads to a lot of wasted space on the bench. Can planners and designers use this result to design more individual chairs instead of benches to reuse the wasted space?
Also, we can observe some human behavior. Would people want to be farther apart from strangers? If some constraints are imposed, e.g., when there are enough seats, what would people choose? When there are not enough seats and people have to sit next to a stranger, do they choose to sit down? These are all questions that we should think about and continue to study.