Diorama-Based User Participation Experiments on Safety Facility Arrangement in School Zones - A Focus on Overlapping School Zone Areas in Seoul -

This study empirically demonstrates that excessive deployment of traffic safety facilities in overlapping school zones can paradoxically reduce their safety effectiveness. Through a three-stage methodology involving surveys, participatory diorama experiments, and interviews, the research revealed that users prioritize qualitative spatial hierarchy and cognitive efficiency over quantitative facility expansion. The results highlight six key insights: excessive facilities disperse attention and induce cognitive fatigue; spatial hierarchy is essential, with concentrated installations preferred at high-risk points and minimized in low-density areas; physical barriers are perceived as more effective than visual cues; continuous 600m school zones are inefficient and require flexible, time-based management; sustainable safety policy must balance safety and efficiency; and finally, hybrid placement combining concentrated and simplified strategies proved most effective. The diorama served as a participatory spatial narrative tool, illustrating safety as a sequential experience—recognition at entry, focused attention at the core, and release at exit. Overall, the study concludes that effective school zone safety depends not on quantitative expansion but on qualitative spatial structuring based on selective concentration and hierarchy, offering a new framework for designing cognitively optimized urban safety environments.