Abstract:

This work aims to analyze current trends in the interior design of shopping malls. These trends have been detected by the students of interior design studies at the EASD (Art School and Design College) in Castelló who have participated as co-researchers with their professors. They have collected data and surveys, and have analyzed them, at the same level as the professors, but it must be pointed out that they have not been part of the methodological design or the research of the theoretical framework for this work.
This research process with co-investigating students has several advantages:
-the student has active participation in his learning, and builds his knowledge himself, making this learning more meaningful.
-this learning is also collaborative and several different visions are obtained with the analysis of the data, therefore the result of the research is richer.
The investigation has been carried out through the study of shopping centres in the city of Castelló de la Plana, some existing, and others already disappeared. For this purpose, architectural plans of these centres have been obtained, and have been analyzed in the classroom. Also, the students have carried out surveys directed at the users of these shopping malls. These surveys included the operation of drawing by memory a map (cognitive map), by the user, in which he indicated the route he usually takes and landmarks that he remembered of this shopping mall.
And before surveying users and analyzing the plans, the student researchers themselves self-surveyed, also making such mental maps only from their memories. Another additional advantage is that being design students, the maps they drew were of greater significance than the maps produced by a typical user.
Finally, the collected cognitive maps have been interpreted in the classroom, and a collective map has been made as an overlay of the individual maps.
This work based on the interpretation of the legibility of a place through cognitive maps drawn by users, had as a pioneer Kevin Lynch, in the 60s. The users he chose to make cognitive maps of his campus were students of architecture, so the definition of these maps provided more information than a standard user would have given. Similarly, this aspect has also reinforced this research, by having interior design students.
Through this work, it has been shown that the atrium, understood as a space open to light, but covered, with several storeys high that faces an empty central space, and with a circular path around this void, is an artefact typical of the most current shopping malls. It is an artefact designed and used by today's human being, Homo Ludens, with complexity proportional to the current evolutionary stage of our species. The way to use this utensil or artefact includes the time we spend in it and how we go through it.
In cognitive maps, it has been found that the atrium is positively remembered by the surveyed users. The atrium appears in the superposition of the individual maps, repeating itself in many of them. It is an area of high cognition, and it is not a physical or material element, but rather an experience, a sensation, a whole.
The atrium, as a design, is part of a current urban planning strategy for interior public spaces, valid to regenerate malls that do not work (instead of abandoning or demolishing them) or to project new shopping malls. Designing atria to remodel obsolete shopping malls is part of a wider trend called demalling.

Keywords:

Cognitive maps, malls, environmental psychology, atrium, demalling.