Wayfinding, or the ability to navigate one's surroundings, is crucial for independent living and requires a complex combination of cognitive abilities, environmental awareness, and technology to manage this successfully. Individuals with cognitive impairment (IwCI) often face significant challenges in learning and navigating their environment. Despite its importance, mainstream navigation technologies are rarely designed with their diverse needs in mind. This study reframes the search for places as a socially distributed task and emphasizes the role of proxy stakeholders, who act on behalf or in coordination with IwCI during navigation. Using a qualitatively led mixed-methods approach, which includes an international survey and a three-stage interview study, we examine the real-world strategies that proxy stakeholders employ to support daily navigation. The findings are synthesized into a set of empirically grounded design recommendations that emphasize customisability, collaborative use, and support for routine-based navigation. Our findings highlight key challenges and adaptive practices, which are synthesized into design recommendations that prioritize customisability, routine-based navigation, and multi-user coordination. By introducing the proxy stakeholder concept into the software engineering literature, we propose a more inclusive approach to requirements elicitation and offer practical guidance for designing navigation technologies that better reflect the complex realities of cognitive support.

翻译：寻路，即个体在周围环境中导航的能力，对于独立生活至关重要，其成功实现需要认知能力、环境意识与技术手段的复杂结合。认知障碍人士在学习与导航其环境时常常面临重大挑战。尽管导航技术至关重要，主流设计却很少考虑到他们多样化的需求。本研究将场所搜索重新定义为一项社会性分布式任务，并强调代理利益相关者在导航过程中代表认知障碍人士或与其协同行动的作用。通过采用以质性研究为主导的混合方法——包括一项国际调查和一项三阶段访谈研究——我们考察了代理利益相关者为支持日常导航所采用的实际策略。研究结果被整合为一组基于实证的设计建议，强调可定制性、协作使用以及对基于日常习惯的导航支持。我们的发现揭示了关键挑战与适应性实践，并最终凝练为优先考虑可定制性、基于日常习惯的导航以及多用户协同的设计建议。通过将代理利益相关者概念引入软件工程文献，我们提出了一种更具包容性的需求获取方法，并为设计能更好反映认知支持复杂现实情境的导航技术提供了实践指导。