Mad about Science: The psychology of architecture

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Staff

What does a casino and an airport have in common? Architectural design.

The cost of building a major casino and an airport is very similar. A medium airport and a large casino can easily cost upward of $4 billion. A tremendous amount of psychological research goes into designing both of these buildings to maximize efficiency and profit. After all, carrying a price tag that large means the owners want to milk every penny they can from their investment to be reasonably paid back within their lifetimes.

In many regards, casino design has borrowed from airport architecture in subtle ways. A well-designed casino is a spacious building with curved walls and pathways that organically flow from place to place, much like an airport. In both structures, this serves to guide people unfamiliar to the area to their destination. In a casino, these paths are designed to lead you into places to spend your money. In an airport, these paths are also designed to lead you into places to spend your money, but with a different twist.

A casino leverages winding pathways and curved floorplans to maximize your exposure to machines and gambling tables, to draw your attention and get you to sit down. It also does this to increase sightlines for two reasons: security monitoring and exposure. If you see more machines, you’ll be more likely to abandon one machine for another if you hit a losing streak, statistically increasing the odds that you’ll spend even more money without ever hitting a payout. This is less likely to occur if you can’t catch another machine or table in your eyeline due to a sharp corner.

Another subtle trick casinos use to keep gamblers engaged is to not include clocks anywhere on the casino floor. It’s easy to lose track of time when you don’t obsessively check the time, which is something airports will also employ for a different reason.

Clocks are subtly hidden in airports. They’re required so that passengers know when to be at their gate, but the presence of a clock also makes a traveler impatient. Waiting during a layover is a frustrating experience that is only exacerbated by watching the clock.

Frustrated and irritable passengers create problems for airline staff at the terminal and on the plane, which in turn contributes to staff burnout and eventual turnover, which means higher costs for the airline to hire and train new employees. Irritable passengers also spend as much as 30% less money while waiting at the airport than passengers that are relaxed.

Design efficiency doesn’t stop at the airport terminal. The entire airport is designed with efficiency in mind, but with efficiency comes tradeoffs. Planes are huge and require a lot of room to taxi into and out of the terminal. You can’t just stack planes up like cars in a parking garage and expect your flights to still leave on time. Architects and engineers need to design the exterior of the airport to maximize the number of planes that can safely load passengers and cargo without gumming up the works.

This is frequently done by creating “islands” — thin strips of terminal space that planes can access from every direction. The tradeoff here is that travelers will have to go underground to get to them, which can make passengers feel uneasy or claustrophobic ahead of their flight. Instead, airports may utilize a curved exterior or extend terminals into what are referred to as “fingers.” Effectively, this design mirrors the folds of our brains: Creating more surface area means more planes can interact with the airport efficiently.

Airport security is a conundrum when factoring in design. The structure is designed to maximize the efficiency of expediting passengers to their destination, with a giant slow zone slapped into the center of it. It’s required to ensure the safety of passengers and crew, but it’s frustrating and stressful to endure.

Multiple crowd control tactics are employed to slow down passengers at security. The slowness is intentional, because it gives TSA agents more time to process individuals and keep the line moving. The zig-zagging barriers are designed to funnel travelers and slow their approach, giving security more time to analyze passengers’ behavior and the items they’re carrying from a distance. It also makes it harder for bad actors to beeline into the heart of the airport.

Despite the intent to slow everything down, security checkpoints are still designed with a sense of efficiency in mind. These areas are built to facilitate multiple travelers per lane, only up to the maximum of what one agent can reasonably control. The scanning stations for checking travelers’ baggage are designed in larger airports to facilitate up to three individuals loading their items into bins before moving on to the next station.

This design is also applied to event venues such as concerts or football games, where psychology is applied to present different types of queueing systems for creating lines. S-shaped, single-file queues work well to funnel a line down into individuals but often cause severe slowdowns. Parallel queues are efficient for managing large groups of individuals but create decision paralysis that can slow down the entire operation. Blending the two into a hybrid system with parallel queues at the end of an S-line works by giving eventgoers plenty of time to figure out which line they want to enter before reaching the venue.

Stay curious, 7B.