The Social in the Visual

A few weeks back I was lucky enough to be asked over to beautiful New Zealand to run a workshop on wayfinding. A big thanks to Dr Mick Abbott for the invitation. I’m no expert in this area, but I’ve never let that stop me before! In design terms a lack of expertise can be used as an opportunity to ask dumb questions (always a good starting point) and to examine all assumptions about a design problem. In this case, how can a system be designed for a remote part of New Zealand that questions previous assumptions about wayfinding? Students in the Master of Design program at Otago University’s Design Studies Department pondered this question for a week following a trip to Arthur’s Pass to experience the impressive location for themselves. This question was complicated by further considerations of local identity: how do you create a wayfinding system that means something to locals and in terms of the local environment?In addition, the students each had a response that took the new Dept. of Conservation (DOC) motto into account: Protect, Enjoy, Be involved. How do you create a system that lures whistle-stop tourists out of the bus to enjoy the local sites, sounds and smells, while also catering to the more seasoned hiker? My undersatanding of wayfinding is that it’s not just about signage. In fact, signage can be a symptom that the marking of the way for travelers has somehow broken down. Paths and landmarks should tell us the way as much, if not more than graphics imposed upon a landscape; especially one as beautiful as New Zealand’s. To get the students to drop their assumptions about visual signage, they were blindfolded one by one and asked to navigate their way around their own university campus. This activity caused them to begin to rely on their senses other than sight. They soon began to sense when the ground was inclining, what kind of surface was under their shoes—grass, gravel, road, brick paving—but also to navigate using sound by keeping road and river sounds to one side or the other. Students reported a difficulty in depth and distance perception while blindfolded. They had a sense of where they were on campus but not how far along a path they were at any time. Blindfolding then throws new light on the sense of sight as a depth-finding sense, rather than a sense for merely regarding objects. This realisation informed many of the projects that followed. Back in the studio, students responded to prompts about their visit to Arthur’s Pass as well as examining unusual ways of creating landmarks and measuring and identifying landscape. I hope we can post some of these student projects soon.

BP’s green branding is being questioned more than ever in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. We can’t help questioning its smaller scale operations closer to home. Has anyone noticed how their bowsers seem to follow no logical progression in the placement of petrol pumps? Some bowsers start with the highest octane fuel at the left and the lowest at the right. One might assume a more logical progression would be to increase octane as you read left to right. The bowser pictured is less logical still. It shows the highest octane in the middle. Shouldn’t customers be allowed to assume that from one BP station to the next the set up at the bowser should be the same? After all, the company, like all oil companies, certainly has gone to great lengths to create station architecture that looks the same from one country to another. Others have noticed the questionable tactics going on at the bowser. Are BP catching people out, a few extra cents at a time, allowing them to pay for a higher octane fuel than they thought they were getting? We’d be interested in your thoughts on this.

These pics were taken at Warwick Station in Perth. The helpful machine speaks to tell you when the next train is coming. BUT the information for the train to Perth is on the FROM PERTH side of the platform. The information for the trains from Perth is on the TO PERTH side. Transperth, please, this is not rocket science, please fix this. At Figures we are of the belief that directional signage of any form is often a symptom that more fundamental aspects of wayfinding (unique landmarks, clear pathways, etc.) are not working as well as they should. When the signage is done the wrong way round like this, it exacerbates this symptom. It’s almost as if Dick Dastardly himself has flipped the signage to foil the other contestants in the race.

Figures: the social in the visual has reached 1! Given that we have reached 1, we thought it was a good time to discuss making some changes to our website. The main reason for this is that we want to become more transparent to our readers. In changing the website, we aim to change the role of the user and change the role of the writer to enhance interactivity. So one thing we are planning to do is, rather than you having to post your names, we propose that the system automatically generates a number, e.g., “reader 1, 2 etc.”. We have had some feedback that writing a comment can be rather intimidating, so we hope that this will create a level of anonymity for you.

We also want to make the visuals more dominant, we are the social in the visual after all! So we are considering that the first page of the site is a list of the visuals with the associated headings without the contextual statement. We are hoping that by focusing on the visuals it will help us in constructing our aesthetic. There will still be the opportunity to post, and we will still keep tags, but we are planning to categorise the information via the outputs. This we hope, will provide a different way of building links with potentially diverse content.

We think that it is about time that we have a “Contact Us” section for you to email any suggestions on the content or future content, or anything that you want to really. Regarding Figures content, we are considering focusing on one major project for a dedicated time, allowing us to work towards a number of outputs: the website, public projection work (see our recent post “Swine Flu”), locative media work (see the post “Locative Infodesign”), booklets / prited material (see “Figures 001: Explosion Over The Horizon”) and many other possibilities. In conjunction to this, we will have a series of sub-projects on the go at anytime, so please keep having a look. We plan to submit new postings at the end of each month, keeping you up to date with our stuff! And, we also want to include questions for you, so we can develop converstaions. So please let us know what you think regarding our birthday makeover plans.

… And here is the video in situ at the Spectrum Gallery. We would love your thoughts on the animations, the difference between the two aesthetics and anything else you notice about these latest Figures works.

… And here is our more rational approach. These two animations, the sensationalist and the rational, were projected next to each other within the gallery. The Swine Flu version was the one passers-by could see from the street. As they approached, viewers began to see the rational approach projected on to a wall more hidden from the street. The two projections were synchronised so that the comparisons were impossible to avoid. Please pop back soon for the video clip …

Here’s the first of two animations that we projected on to the walls of the Spectrum Gallery in Beaufort Street, Perth, last week. We’re beginning to get to grips with what this Figures thing can be. All along we’ve wanted to look at alternative visuals for news. Here we decided to compare the usual news approach of photographs and attention grabbing headlines with a more reasoned approach (next post).

We need your feedback on our site.

Here is a little spiel to explain our research, please let us know what you think!

We are examining both the form and content of news information using the web and info graphics as interrogative tools. We feel that these two belong together as we can reach a broad audience in the same way that news media does. And at the same time proposing new ways of shaping information visually.

This is an examination of alternative news information – we don’t profess to provide answers, far more it is about presenting information in new ways. A lot of the postings so far are about the form, using new models to communicate socially relevant information, hence the content is at times arbitrary. After this initial research period we hope to have some productive visual forms we can apply to media content that we feel is worth investigating.

So after reading our spiel, please have a look and post your thoughts on the Figures website: Which postings do you connect with and why? Can you spot any key themes that are worth developing? What are some issues that you might like to be addressed? Are there any problems with this approach? 

We look forward to you sharing your thoughts about Figures.  

Mapping using the Internet, like most applications on the web, seems to begin by using existing models of visualisation. It makes sense to use what we know and understand about paper maps from their long history. When maps are used as a tool to try and locate a place there is a relationship between that visualised place and the actual place. The main difference between a printed map and a virtual might be the passage of time. The Internet, with its ability to change and update quickly, gives us the ability to apply filters to the visualisations.

Google maps is a good example. These maps employ the aesthetic of a road map: A bird’s eye view; small icons; various line widths and colours to denote area. (more…)

Our friends over at Hidden Shoal Recordings had a gig in December ‘08 for which Uriah and I designed this flash animation of music biz statistics (from stats gathered by Uriah and Dr Malcom Riddoch). We looked at various music technologies and how each has been superceded. We tried to show that the markets have arrived at favouring digital downloads (at least for the present): Hidden Shoal’s main method of distribution. At the gig, this animation was projected directly on to a matt black wall in an almost completely black room. Amazingly this experiment paid off. The effect is much as you see here: bright white lines on a black ground, but with the added advantage of a borderless background for the graphics to float upon. Anyway, we think we have something that’s aesthetically engaging, but what about consistency? Are these hard to decipher? Your thoughts would be appreciated.