Making sense of maps Aris Venetikidis
what I do is I organize information I’m
a graphic designer
professionally I try to make sense often
of things that don’t make much sense
themselves so my father might not
understand what it is that I do for a
living his part of my ancestry has been
farmers his part of this ethnic minority
called the Pontic Greeks they lived in
Asia Minor and fled to Greece after
genocide about a hundred years ago and
ever since that migration has somewhat
been a theme in my family my father
moved to Germany studied there and
married and as a result I now have this
half German brain with all the
analytical thinking and that slight
dorky demeanor that come with that and
of course it meant that I was a
foreigner in both countries and that of
course made it pretty easy for me to
migrate as well and good family
tradition if you like but of course most
journeys that we undertake from day to
day are within a city and especially if
you know the 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
so I washed up on a Dublin ferry port
about 12 years ago a professional
foreigner if you like and I’m sure
you’ve all had this experience before
yeah you have I arrived 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 build 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 those humans of course
we don’t move around marking our
territory by scents like dogs we don’t
run around emitting ultrasonic squeaks
Batz we just don’t do that although a
night in the temp of our district can
get pretty well no and 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 layouts that for that
follows some sort of circular city logic
yeah maybe you’ve had that experience as
well right let’s say you are 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 eros 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 don’t know
about you but I always feel like I find
this wormhole or or this
interdimensional portal so we move along
linear routes and our mind straightened
streets and perceives turns as 90-degree
angles 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 along those lines if
you go to the Irish countryside and you
ask an old lady for directions brace
yourself for some elaborate Irish
storytelling about all the landmarks
yeah she’ll tell you the pub where her
sister used to work and go past that
church where I got married that kind of
thing so we fill our cognitive maps with
these markers of meaning what’s more
we the abstract repeat patterns and
recognize them we recognize them by the
experiences and we abstract them into
symbols and of course we’re all capable
of understanding these symbols 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 beer mat 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 know what
you’ve just drawn is more like a dry
gram or earth or a schematic it’s a
visual construct of lines dots letters
design in the language of our brains so
it’s no big surprise that the big
information design icon of the last
century the pinnacle of showing
everybody how to get from A to B the
London Underground map was not designed
by a cartographer or a city planner it
was designed by an engineering draftsmen
in the 1930s Harry Beck applied the
principles of schematic diagram design
and changed the way public transport
maps are designed forever
now the very key to the success of this
map is in the omission of important less
important information and in the extreme
simplification so straighten streets
corners of 90 and 45 degrees but also
the extreme Geographic distortion in
that map if you were to look at
the actual locations of these stations
you see they’re very different yeah but
this is all for the clarity of the
public cubemap yeah if you say wanted to
get from regents park station to Great
Portland Street the Tube map would tell
you take the tube go to Baker Street
change over take another tube of course
what you don’t know is that the two
stations are only about 100 meters apart
now we’ve reached the subject of public
transport and public transport here in
Dublin is this somewhat touchy subject
for everybody who does not know the
public transport here in Dublin
essentially we have the system of local
buses that grew with the city for every
outskirt that was added there was
another bus route added running from the
outskirt all the way to the city centre
and as these local buses approached the
city centre
they all run side by side and converge
and pretty much one Main Street so when
I stopped stepped off the boat 12 years
ago I try to make sense of that because
exploring a city on foot only gets you
so far but when you explore a foreign
and new public transport system you will
build a cognitive map in your mind in
pretty much the same way typically you
choose yourself a rapid transport route
and in your mind this route is perceived
as a straight line and like a pearl
necklace all the stations and stops and
are nicely and neatly aligned along the
along the line and only then you start
to discover some local bus routes that
would fill in the gaps and that allow
you for those wormhole interdimensional
portal shortcuts so I try to make sense
and when I arrived I was looking for
some information leaflets that would
help me crack this system and understand
it and I found those brochures
they were not geographically distorted
they were having a lot of omission of
information but unfortunately the wrong
information say in the city center there
were never actually any lines that
showed the roots they’re actually not
even any stations with names now the
lines the the maps of Dublin transport
have gotten better and after I finished
the project they got a good a good bit
better but still no station names still
no routes so being naive and being half
German I decided Aris why don’t you
build your own map so that’s what I did
I researched how each and every bus
route moved through the city nice and
logical every bus route a separate line
and I plotted it into my own map of
Dublin and in the city centre I got a
nice spaghetti place
now this is a bit of a mess so I I
decided of course you’re going to apply
the rules of schematic design clearing
up the corridors widening the streets
where there were loads of buses and
making the streets at straight 90-degree
corners 45-degree corners of fractions
of that and filled it in with the bus
routes and I built a city center bus map
of the system how it was five years ago
as women again so that you get the full
impact of the keys and the Westmoreland
Street now I can proudly say
I can proudly say as the public
transport map this diagram is an otter
failure except probably in one aspect I
now had a great visual representation of
just how clogged up and overrun the city
centre really was now call me
old-fashioned right but I think a public
transport route map should have lines
because that’s what they are yeah there
are little pieces of string that wrap
their way through the city center or
through the city if you will the Greek
guy inside of me feels if I don’t get a
line it’s like entering the labyrinth of
the Minotaur without having Ariadne
giving you the string to find your way
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 public transport network
on a physical level but it’s also the
crucial step to make a public transport
network mapable on a visual level so I
teamed up with a gentleman called James
Lee he a civil engineer and recent
masters graduate of sustainable
development program at di T and together
we drafted the simplified model network
which I could then go ahead and
visualize so here’s what we did we
distributed these rapid transport
corridors throughout the city center and
extended them into the outskirts wrap it
because we wanted them to be served by
rapid transport vehicles yeah
they would get exclusive road news were
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 bus those rapid transport
corridors would be visibly distinct
vegetable 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’s of our place
constantly being clogged up with maps
and the outcome one of the outcomes was
this map of the Greater Dublin area has
oom in a little bit
this map only shows the rapid transport
connections no local bus very much in
the metros map style that was so
successful in London and that since has
been exported to so many other major
cities and therefore is the language
that we should use for public transport
maps what’s also important is with a
simplified network like this it now
would become possible for me to tackle
the ultimate challenge and make a public
transport map for the city centre one
where I wouldn’t just show rapid
transport connections but also all the
local bus routes streets and the likes
and this is what a map like this could
look like I’ll zoom in a little bit in
this map I’m including each transport
mode so rapid transport both dart tram
and the lights each each individual
route is represent represented by a
separate line the map shows each and
every station each and every station
name and I’m also display displaying
side streets in fact most of the side
streets even with their name and for
good measure also a couple of landmarks
some of them
fight by little symbols others by these
isometric three-dimensional
bird’s-eye-view drawings the map is
relatively small and over all sides 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 the best
balance between actual representation
and simplification the language of
wayfinding 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 a
in an actual accurate Street map and
this is how they would look in my
distorted simplified public transport
map so for successful public transport
map we should not stick to accurate
representation but design them in the
way our brains work the reactions I got
were tremendous it was really good to
see and of course for my own self I was
very happy to see that my folks in
Germany and Greece
finally have an idea what I do for a
living