6. Conclusions
It is important for designers to consider the safety perceptions in passenger ships in order to develop environments in which people will feel comfortable. Summarizing, our findings demonstrate that if designers want to increase people's safety perceptions, they could use a curved ceiling design and a view to the outside at the end of the corridor. Furthermore, they should make use of clear and continuous architectural lines and thus avoid complicated ones, such as split-level wall designs. Employing these guidelines will create more openness and will give a more clear guidance to people. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that the current design of the cabin corridors in passenger ships is far from optimal from a safety perception perspective. At present, these environments often contain split-level characteristics, for example to cover heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems, and curvilinear design or views to outside are a rare sight. Although we realize that changing the architectural design in passenger ships is a challenging task because there are many contradicting requirements to consider, we do feel that professionals involved in the passenger ship design can greatly benefit from our guidelines for the design of future ships. For example, ship classification societies that develop references for ship comfort design, could make use of the provided understanding in order to design passenger ships that are not only safe from an objective perspective, but also feel safe. Only if people feel safe, they can truly enjoy the travel, and thus there is much to gain by increasing people's safety perceptions.
