Aris Venetikidis: Making sense of maps

According to this research:

Advantages of Public Transport: Various transport methods.

Disadvantage of Public Transport: The map is not optimised.

Possible Outcome: A new map for London that display a specific way of travel(maybe a relaxing method which combine walking and public transport)

Format of Outcome: A map.

Research needed: Travel information of London, Public transport of London. 

Possible Outcome looks like:

After we designed the map, we could sale them.

Research Content:

http://www.ted.com/talks/aris_venetikidis_making_sense_of_maps.html?quote=1893

… most journeys that we undertake from day to day are within a city … getting from A to B may seem pretty obvious, right? But the question is, why is it obvious? How do we know where we're going?

…

You arrive in a new city, and your brain is trying to make sense of this new place. Once you find your base, your home, you start to built this cognitive map of your environment. It's essentially this virtual map that only exists in your brain. All animal species do it, even though we all use slightly different tools. Us humans, of course, we don't move around marking our territory by scent, like dogs. We don't run around emitting ultrasonic squeaks, like bats. We just don't do that, although a night in the Temple Bar district can get pretty wild. (Laughter)

... we do two important things to make a place our own.

First, we move along linear routes. 

Typically we find a main street, and this main street becomes a linear strip map in our minds. But our mind keeps it pretty simple, yeah? Every street is generally perceived as a straight line, and we kind of ignore the little twists and turns that the streets make.

When we do, however, make a turn into a side street, our mind tends to adjust that turn to a 90-degree angle. This of course makes for some funny moments when you're in some old city layout that follows some sort of circular city logic, yeah? Maybe you've had that experience as well, right? Let's say you're on some spot on a side street that projects from a main cathedral square, and you want to get to another point on a side street just like that. The cognitive map in your mind may tell you, "Aris, go back to the main cathedral square, take a 90-degree turn, and walk down that other side street." But somehow you feel adventurous that day, and you suddenly discover that the two spots were actually only a single building apart. Now, I don't know about you, but I always feel like I find this wormhole or this inter-dimensional portal.

The second thing that we do to make a place our own is we attach meaning and emotions to the things that we see along those lines.

...What's more, we're all capable of understanding the cognitive maps, and you are all capable of creating these cognitive maps yourselves. So next time, when you want to tell your friend how to get to your place, you grab a beermat, grab a napkin, and you just observe yourself create this awesome piece of communication design. It's got straight lines. It's got 90 degree corners. You might add little symbols along the way. And when you look at what you've just drawn, you realize it does not resemble a street map. If you were to put an actual street map on top of what you've just drawn, you'd realize your streets and the distances, they'd be way off. No, what you've just drawn is more like a diagram or a schematic. It's a visual construct of lines, dots, letters, designed in the language of our brains.

So the outcome of my academic research, loads of questionnaires, case studies, and looking at a lot of maps, was that a lot of the problems and shortcomings of the public transport system here in Dublin was the lack of a coherent public transport map -- a simplified, coherent public transport map -- because I think this is the crucial step to understanding a public transport network on a physical level, but it's also the crucial step to make a public transport network mappable on a visual level.

So here's what we did. We distributed these rapid transport corridors throughout the city center, and extended them into the outskirts. Rapid, because we wanted them to be served by rapid transport vehicles, yeah? They would get exclusive road use, where possible, and it would be high-quantity, high-quality transport. James wanted to use bus rapid transport for that, rather than light rail. For me, it was important that the vehicles that would run on those rapid transport corridors would be visibly distinguishable from local buses on the street. 

Now we could take out all the local buses that ran alongside those rapid transport means. Any gaps that appeared in the outskirts were filled again. So, in other words, if there was a street in an outskirt where there had been a bus, we put a bus back in, only now these buses wouldn't run all the way to the city center but connect to the nearest rapid transport mode, one of these thick lines over there. So the rest was merely a couple of months of work, and a couple of fights with my girlfriend of our place constantly being clogged up with maps, and the outcome, one of the outcomes, was this map of the Greater Dublin Area. 

The map is relatively small in overall size, so something that you could still hold as a fold-out map, or display in a reasonably-sized display box on a bus shelter. 
I think it tries to be the best balance between actual representation and simplification, the language of way-finding in our brain. 

So straightened lines, cleaned-up corners, and, of course, that very, very important geographic distortion that makes public transport maps possible. If you, for example, have a look at the two main corridors that run through the city, the yellow and orange one over here, this is how they look in an actual, accurate street map, and this is how they would look in my distorted, simplified public transport map.

By Zack