Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
ِFaculty of Architecture and Art, University of Guilan, Rasht, Iran
Abstract
In many Iranian cities, the quantitative growth of outdoor advertising has been accompanied by a decline in visual environmental quality; yet how citizens actually experience this condition — in real space and in real time — remains unstudied. Shams-Abadi Street in Isfahan, with its distinctive medical-commercial identity and location within the city's UNESCO-listed historic fabric, presents a case in which accumulated billboards, banners and murals stand in apparent conflict with the area's cultural-historical character. This paper investigates the lived experience of citizens encountering outdoor advertising on this street and asks: what layers of experience emerge in this encounter, and what factors shape the relationship between visual stimulus and citizen response?
A qualitative, multi-method design was adopted. The primary data-collection instrument was the go-along interview (Kusenbach, 2003), which places the researcher alongside the participant in the real environment so that lived experience can be captured in situ. Twenty participants (11 male, 9 female; aged 20–60) were recruited through purposive sampling and accompanied along an 800-metre fixed route. Data were analysed through three complementary layers using methodological triangulation: reflexive thematic analysis of interview transcripts (Braun & Clarke, 2006), thematic analysis of 113 behavioural incidents recorded during walks, and systematic visual coding of 20 purposively selected advertising images across 16 variables.
Three overarching themes emerged from the interview layer: a quantity-quality contradiction leading to perceptual saturation; a sharp gap between the street's historical-cultural identity and the content of its advertising; and the dominance of negative affect (70 codes) over positive (53 codes). The key finding from the incident layer was that 41.8% of all recorded reactions (208 instances) took the form of spontaneous unprompted discourse — not message processing. Visual analysis documented critically low design quality (mean 1.95/5) and historical contextual fit (mean 1.90/5). Based on triangulation across the three data layers, the Multi-Layer Lived Experience model (MLLE) is proposed, demonstrating that lived experience operates simultaneously across embodied, affective-cognitive, and semantic-identity levels. The study introduces cultural affordance as an extension of Gibson's theory in historically rich urban settings, and identifies 'advertising as urban discourse trigger' as a previously undocumented fourth function of outdoor advertising.
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