Friday research

This morning I did some research to find out where the borders of the different zones were so that we could go out and look at the lamp posts in these particular positions.

The Red Zone is pretty much anything within a couple of meters of the water - so Oriental Parade, Te Papa, Frank Kitts Park, and just generally along the waterfront.

The Orange Zone is a bigger zone that extends further inland up Kent/Cambridge Terrace, along Courtenay Place/Manners Street, Willis Street, and Lambton Quay.

Then the Yellow Zone goes a little further up Kent/Cambridge Terrace, further up Willis and up to Dixon and Cuba Streets, and up past the Beehive to The Terrace.

When we met up and went out to look around it was lucky I'd worked out where to go as the others were just going to wander but I'd come up with a plan of where to go so it meant our time was used most purposefully.

I've uploaded the images in google drive, but have a few here as key references:

These lampposts run down a path from the waterfront which is part of the red zone. As a reasonably well used traffic area these could be a good series of poles to use.










Some of them have power availability as well (used for when there are food trucks there) but these could allow us more opportunities.

 

Some lamp posts already had a lot of existing additions - this one has street signs and road signs so would be a no-go for us.

The lamp posts in Courtenay Place have funny little symbols up in the top triangle section which are left over from a Chinese New Year festival a couple of years ago. This highlights what Nick Kapica spoke about when he was in with the council letting things be put up and then not taking them down. We consider this as an opportunity space where we could take down the old and purposeless pieces and replace them with something around tsunami awareness which wouldn't date.











I also did some research into the history of Tsunamis in New Zealand as this had not been passed forward by the previous teams.

What I found was:
Wairarapa Earthquake 23 Jan 1855 tilted Wellington, and with it the Wellington Harbour. The eastern side of the harbour moved 0.8m higher than the western side, displacing the water into the shoreline along Lambton Quay and flooding it's houses and shops.
20 minutes after the quake a 3-4m high tsunami entered through Wellington Harbour and spread across to the Lyall Bay/Kilbirnie Area.
Due to the nature of our harbour, the water continued to slosh back and forth for a number of hours.

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Wednesday feedback + moving forward

We presented our tsunami brief ideas in class today, and got some great feedback regarding each project.

For the big letter form one:
- is there another way to connect the letters other than spelling the word TSUNAMI?
- maybe a closer proximity of letters will result in clearer communication.
- idea is lovely - but it still has to communicate a message.
- do you make it so that the letters are legible from a certain perspective?
- still have to make it clear that its being used to raise awareness/warning - don't celebrate tsunamis!
- could try 'submerging' letters.
- could try putting information on the letters themselves.
- think on the materiality of the letters.

For the lamp posts:
- just painting a whole lamp post blue feels unresolved, how do you use heights to create communication on the lamp posts?
- can you play with the light itself and make it acts like a wave/patter/rippling?
- could there be ripples around the bottom of the lamp post - and the size and scale of those communicate a message?

I definitely wanted to continue to work on one of the tsunami briefs this week but we made it really clear that we believed the two projects needed to split back up from being a tsupergroup and become two separate projects again.

Franziska and Nicole were really keen to join the lamp post idea from the tsunami group and because I'd worked on this quite influentially last week I felt like I would be a great remainder from last week to carry over the information to these new enthusiastic members. Micky also joined us and we all went to discuss the idea and how we were going to progress it.

We bounced a lot of ideas around - Fran had lots of crazy/wacky/wild ideas and Nicole and I saw more of a need for a sensible approach so we discussed everything and agreed that whilst making wacky bendy/destroyable lamp posts would be fun - it wasn't a very well thought out idea in terms of utilising what is existing.
We talked about heights on the lamp post reflecting water levels but decided we needed to stay away from these kind of indications as it creates a false sense of security in people - thinking that if they're above that height they'll be safe when in reality it's the strength of a tsunami as well as height that is so damaging.
Because of this idea of strength we thought about putting posts on an angle to show the power but then realised this would be reallllllly hard to do!
We considered putting a narrative winding up/wrapping around the post to tell a story of history and awareness.
We thought about the lighting more and the potential of using sensors to catch peoples attention.
We thought of using the different post designs to border the different safety zones.

So we are meeting up on Friday morning to walk around these zones and take some pictures and get a feel for the space/posts.

Tsunami Tsupergroup Tuesday Team Meeting!

It was great to meet up with everyone today and start fleshing out ideas for this brief a bit more.

To start, we all shared our research/thoughts/how the project had progressed over the past couple of weeks.

My thoughts were all about, how do we strip this back to something simple, clear, and communicative? How do we re-instigate type as the central tool?

I had come across World Tsunami Awareness Day when doing some research which is a very New Zealand styled "campaign" but was actually generated by the United Nations General Assembly as part of a world wide recognition around the natural disaster. [Taken from their website]. "It is important to create a community and individual understanding about how and where to evacuate before a wave strikes. Tsunamis know no borders, making international cooperation key for deeper political and public understanding of risk reduction measures. As a result, the UN General Assembly has made 5 November into World Tsunami Awareness Day, with the first edition being held this year [2016]." The team all agreed this was highly relevant research and it did have a very kiwi feel through the use of pattern similar to the Maori patterns that were looked into in previous weeks.

Kim had done some really great visual research and I was particularly intrigues by the idea of using ripples as a feature, and looking into height that spreads down onto the ground.

From this we spent about an hour just bouncing around and playing with ideas.

A key turning point in our process was when we thought we were all on board with this idea of ripples, but we were actually on completely different pages!

Whilst many of us were thinking of using the ripple as a situation/placemaking tool, i.e. follow the outer rings to the middle of the ripple as that's where you'll be safe, others thought of it like rippling water in terms of wanting to be away from the rough area (the middle) and move out to the edges of the ripple as this will be where the least damage will occur. It was well put by Katie when she mentioned "in an Earthquake you wouldn't want to be in the epicentre would you?"

This kind of but a bit of a speed bump in front of us as we discussed whether these opposing interpretations could be combatted but couldn't come to a resolution so what we've decided is to keep in the back as an idea that we will get feedback on from the class.

We also thought about subtle places/areas we could use to create placemaking/navigational type and considered the kerb of the footpath as this is a currently unused space. However ran into a lot of issues there as well with people thinking of it as a dingy space, where the rain water goes, and things get clogged up etc.

We sat for a while just thinking and talking aloud about what we were trying to solve and even went back to the brief again. The key points we took from the brief were:

Tsunami guidelines can be easily noted and forgotten, enabling a certain level of societal complacency.

Can indicators that show the way to safety be integrated into the city unobtrusively or in some obvious way to amuse (and thus become memorable) for locals and visitors alike?

How might the diversity available in visual, spatial and interactive media provide a permanent yet discreet and aesthetically interesting reminder of the situation Wellingtonians may need to confront at any time?

And our own thoughts were how do we create something that is big enough and has enough impact to be noticed and memorable, but isn't so big that its intrusive? TOUGH ASK!

Then we started watching some videos of a tsunami, and thinking about what happens in a tsunami and whilst devastating to watch actually really helped. We thought up together about the displacement of objects in a tsunami - boats end up on roof's etc. And then we thought about how we could replace the boats with type and have it dimensionally sticking out of or on buildings at obscure angles as if it had been washed into them. We built on this and thought about using the letters of TSUNAMI in a way that from one letter you can see another letter or two but can't see all of them at one point. We all fell really in love with this idea and wanted to get into testing it but didn't have the capacity today.





We then remembered that even though there were only 6 of us - we were a "supergroup" which meant we still had to develop another solution.

We thought back to last weeks feedback and how the tutors had been somewhat disappointed that the team had moved away from the lamp posts, and went back to this and thought about how that could develop as an idea. We came up with a really neat idea that developed off the original one where some lamp posts in the cbd are painted blue and have blue light installed instead of orange. And on these - at approx eye level height - would be instructions on how far it was to a tsunami safe zone. This is a simple navigational way to generate tsunami awareness and also provide an aspect of wayfinding. We liked adding information at this level of the post as we had been struggling with where to put information for people as on the ground didn't seems like the best option as in the situation of a tsunami there are potentially going to be too many people moving around for you to see whats on the ground. I mocked this up roughly so that we could get feedback on it at tomorrow's presentation.

We then put together a slideshow to show our ideas visually so as to hopefully be able to get some good feedback on them, and get some people inspired to join us to work on them as two members have to leave the group this week as it is their 3rd week on the project.

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Reading

I feel like this project has been moving a bit slowly and so this afternoon I wanted to get myself a bit more immersed in it to hopefully spark some insights, ideas and thoughts to kick the project up a gear.

There were two key takeaways from the readings that really stuck with me and I wanted to share. These were:

"The more signs clutter our path, the more savvy our wayfinding tools must become to stay relevant and eye catching" - Sofia Borges, from the reading "You Are Here".

&

"Morag Myerscough believes that wayfinding is not solely about a series of signs but should be equally concerned with bringing out the narrative in the built environment, enhancing the physical experience" - from the reading "IDN Environmental".

& the I wanted to keep a note of this diagram for future reference:

Wednesday Class week 4

This morning we had a great lecture from Nick that was really inspiring as to what he is and has worked on, and just eye opening to the fact that you can be looking and photographing and noticing all the time.

Then during class time it was time for more "presentations" to share with the rest of the cohort where the project was at. This was really helpful for us with our project being in that initial stage and needing feedback. People were very responsive and positive towards the "herding" idea and agreed that testing was the next step for this. People must've liked it enough because when it came to shuffling groups, we had a couple of people wanting to join. The shame of it was was that we were all quite keen to stay on the project and do the testing.

At the same time, the poor tsunami supergroup had diminished and needed more people so despite wanting to stay with street safety and do some testing, I jumped ship to help the tsunami team out which I was happy enough about as I'd got quite a lot of ideas whilst they had been presenting about how to make their idea a bit more settled.

Team Meeting

This afternoon we had a team meeting however it was very messy as not everyone could make it and we were trying to communicate as a team in person and on Facebook, however we did still generate some good ideas.

Micky had a few really great pics from the Manners location that I thought were really relevant:

This one is gold because despite having crossed her many a time - I have never noticed it! Makes me think the ground might not be a successful medium for attracting attention.

And I never realised this said shared space - how many other pedestrians have ignored that and just think it is a continued pedestrian area??


I shared my research with the team and was a bit disappointed that they didn't find my insights as exciting as I had thought they were. Instead everyone got caught up in mocking up ideas (which tbh I think is pointless without a foundation behind them) but we prepared 2 ideas for tomorrow's class.

1. was a mock up Blake had created of coloured triangles on the ground to warn drivers they are coming up to an intersection/pedestrian crossing. However the location he chose wasn't one of the agreed locations from last week and had kind of come out of nowhere. I was a bit confused by the idea as it was on the ground - which is a good platform for pedestrians but probably not cars - where things need to be more at eye level. Unfortunately the team didn't feel comfortable discussing ideas critically with each other so this got overlooked.

2. was an idea I generated (and mocked up terribly) that Joe was able to mock up much nicer in the other location. It was about creating a structure with type that would "herd" pedestrians to try and lead them to the safe spots to cross the road. At the manners intersection this would operate to stop people from walking across and into the shared car/pedestrian space, and on the 4 way intersection could work on the corners to lead pedestrians back down the road away from the intersection to make it safer.

Micky and I put together some introductory slides to present tomorrow that introduced the issue and some visual precedents as this wildcard topic was only in it's initial stage (kind of a week behind other projects).

Research

So I started my research with the Cuba St/Abel Smith St intersection and found a couple of interesting blog type articles that respond to the issue.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/motoring/83746463/Explainer-Whats-the-big-problem-at-Wellingtons-most-puzzling-intersection
This covered off what the actual rules are at the intersection, and some of the opinions of locals as to why they think different solutions aren't good ideas. When this was written at $200,000 installation of lights at this intersection was in the pipeworks but has since been tossed out.

http://eyeofthefish.org/four-way-stop/
This was a very strong opinion piece that trashed the idea of putting lights in at the intersection, but also recognised that for pedestrians the intersection is so unsafe because drivers not only don't know the rules but also don't abide by them (STOP signs are often ignored and treated as "rolling stops".

From here I wanted to look into all the rules, and the thing is is that there are a couple of different ways people rule the intersection. This video exemplified a first in first served rule:

But NZTA don't acknowledge this scenario as a special case and simply apply the standard give way rules. I.e:

• Give way to your right.
• And, if you are turning, give way to all traffic that is not turning.

With this research behind me, I then moved onto looking at existing practical solutions, as well as design interventions at intersections and found the following:

https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/walkable-cities-intersection-design-for-pedestrians
Was a great article that discussed ways to prioritise pedestrian safety at intersections. The two I really found interesting were the raised crossings and the protected intersections and wonder if there could be a way to use these in conjunction with spatial typography to provide a realistic as well as impressive solution.

Then on the more artistic side of things there were two New Zealand projects which caught my eye:

https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/3-d-crossings-help-keep-students-safe

Was a super cool idea from Otago in which they painted 3D crossings in student areas to begin with that gave perspective to drivers - but looked like normal crossings to pedestrians to help keep students safe in the high student population areas. With the intention that if they were successful the idea could be spread to other parts of Dunedin.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/75881343/painting-project-to-turn-riccarton-intersection-from-bland-to-beautiful

And this was in Riccarton and wasn't exactly designed for safety as such. It was a community art project that also had an element of making streets safer involved by the nature of where the work was. The idea came from Portland, Oregon, and is hoped to slow drivers down by creating a sense of calm and a reminder of humanity on the road.

Wednesday Class

Today's class consisted of presentations from each group on where they'd gotten to in their first week.

For our group, we got some really good feedback on the fact that ideation wise we'd done really great, but what our project needed was the backing research to flesh it out and lead the next lot of decision making. This was really valuable feedback.

After seeing all of the presentations I was really inspired by the safety idea that had been raised by the Wildcard group so during shuffle time I moved over with them to discuss moving forward.

It seemed a lot of people were interested in what the wildcard team had come up with and so we split into two groups - 1 group looking at the Wellington identity idea, and the other looking at the safety idea.

I got together with the other people doing safety and we decided that the intersection on Cuba street that had been raised held a lot of potential but that the original location at the Cuba/Manners intersection also still held a lot of merit and that to start with it might be best to look into both locations, so 3 of us are looking into the intersection up by Ekim, and the other 3 are looking into the intersection of Manners and Cuba, then we will meet and decide on whether we need to select just one location to move forward or if it we think it is possible to devise a system that will be applicable to both, and more dangerous pedestrian spots in Wellington.

I am really excited to shift onto a new brief and one that I have a bit more experience with.

Ideation is also my favourite part of working on a brief and this project is still in it's initial stages so I am excited to be able to work on ideation again for another brief.

Tuesday Meeting

We arranged as a group to meet up between 9-11am today to bring together our research and prepare for class tomorrow morning. Unfortunately people didn't really come with much - except for Blake who had started invisioning some ideas.
So as a team we started brainstorming from the points Jo had mentioned regarding what the issue is etc.

Then from there we started to think about possible solutions.

Then picking our favourite two we fleshed them out a bit more.

From there we started thinking about what exactly we were going to present tomorrow.

I started a google doc for us, and we agreed that the Torino precedent I'd brought along was a great example that we wanted to share with the studio, so I would put that into the slide. Blake's shadowing ideas were super cool and we really liked the idea around that so wanted to have that as the proposal idea we present at the end of our presentation tomorrow. Then the others decided they wanted to put precedent ideas into the presentation too so we agreed that everyone would pick on really relevant precedent to speak about in the presentation for how it relates to this project. Unfortunately not everyone did this in quite the way I'd have liked and it felt a bit messy and unresolved, but as it is the first week on brief I felt that a bit of messiness and lots of options wasn't the worst thing in the world and at least opened us up to more feedback.

Below are the slides I generated for the presentation (Blake and I combined to pick out the key opportunity images between our two sets of shots).

The other part of our homework was to put examples of spatial type we'd noticed on our journey onto a Google Map Jo had created. Below are screenshots of the pins I added (nb. For some reason you can't upload portrait images or they rotate - irritating - but that's why some of my images are on their side).

Precedent Research

After walking the route between the cruise ships and the cable car, I looked into some existing wayfinding precedents that we may be able to draw ideas from.

One really unique one that I came across was Tourist Wayfinding in Matera.
I popped together a few of the key photos that showed why I liked it. So what they did was take landmarks, and use them to create icons/symbols. Then those symbols translated into patterns and colours which then carried across into a wayfinding system. I really liked the use of landmarks, as we have a lot of great landmarks around Wellington that we could use in a similar way.

http://dropr.com/stefaniavolpe/47843/tourist_wayfinding_for_matera_2/+?p=320635

Another precedent I looked into was Talk To: Torino Speaks clearly.
This caught my attention when I saw the way bollards had been used to generate wayfinding. It was another example where a dialogue had been created for the project in terms of the colour coded split between services, leisure, and culture, and a series of symbols had been generated within these codes. It would be interesting to see what/if any of these could carry across from Europe and be applicable in New Zealand as one of the issues with this project is that you're trying to make things easy for people from a variety of different places. Then as I looked deeper into the project I saw that they had carried this idea out across more permanent structures in the city which is such a great use of what is already available and excited my even more.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/5801615/Talk-To-Torino-parla-chiaro

And lastly, I came across an interesting article that kind of covered the landmark technique I'd considered earlier. It broke down the process that they'd been through in a really simple visual manner which I thought would be interesting to share with my group at our meeting on Tuesday.

https://makeapowerfulpoint.wordpress.com/tag/tourist/

First week on brief!

Today's class was really great and got me really excited for the upcoming 11 weeks!
I felt like I hadn't missed too much last week and that I was able to hit the ground running on this project today.

We had show/tell of our examples we found and then were given the low down on the briefs we will be responding to over the course of the paper.

They are:

01/02: Cruise ship to Cablecar
(at least two solutions required from the studio)

Visitors to Wellington by cruise ship often have limited time in the city, and often have the same tick list of ‘must do’ items: head up the cable car and walk through the Botanic Gardens. How can access to the Botanic Gardens be facilitated by typography in the environment? What surfaces, objects, existing infrastructure can be used to show a route? How is this managed in relation to other signage? How are existing solutions working (or not)? How much should a system communicate beyond how to get there? (for instance, interpretation of notable sites along the way)…

03: One man’s trash…
(at least one solution required from the studio)

Wellington City Council landfill manages waste for the region as a whole, including recycling. There is a recycling centre at the Southern landfill that collects glass, cardboard and certain plastics. How can the landfill better communicate how to dispose of recyclable material, and what happens to these materials beyond a user putting them in the bins? Consider how issues of waste and recycling (which you will need to define) can be articulated and how an educational system in situ for communication around what goes where, and the broader issues of waste could be developed. How can spatial information systems be used to explain what happens to waste that goes into the recycling stream and encourage good practice?

04: Where there’s muck there’s brass
(at least one solution required from the studio)

Second Treasures is Wellington City Council’s recycling shop. Consider the potential for waste materials from the landfill being repurposed for spatial typographic communication purposes such as signage or installation in-situ at the Second Treasures site, and also as an off-site system for advertising Second Treasures and the general issues around recycling that it facilitates.  

05/06: Tsunami in the CBD
(at least two solutions required from the studio)

Wellington is a geologically active region, prone to earthquakes, and as a result, susceptible to tsunami. WREMO (Wellington Regional Emergency Management Office) has overseen a programme of producing ‘blue lines’ on the roads in suburbs across Wellington to communicate how to reach a safe distance from the sea, but there is no equivalent for the CBD. The Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management (MCDEM) messaging in their recent public awareness campaign gives clear and direct notice to those who reside and work in close proximity to the sea: if a quake is long or strong, take action to remove yourself—don’t wait. However these guidelines can be easily noted and forgotten, enabling a certain level of societal complacency. Considering contemporary information consumption patterns, and in the case of Wellington’s unique environment, what might be the best way for WREMO to impart the information or prompt appropriate behaviours? Can indicators that show the way to safety be integrated into the city unobtrusively or in some obvious way to amuse (and thus become memorable) for locals and visitors alike? In the other suburbs where the Tsunami Blue Lines are currently applied, the lines themselves have a primarily functional aesthetic. Can the urban environment and steep geography inspire and offer further opportunity to extend the aesthetic and functional purpose derived from the CBD itself? How might application of the Tsunami Blue Lines engage the public and the passer-by in time and place? How might the diversity available in visual, spatial and interactive media provide a permanent yet discreet and aesthetically interesting reminder of the situation Wellingtonians may need to confront at any time?

07/08: Cycleway yey!

(two solution required from the studio)

Cycleways are a hot topic in Wellington at the moment (see the Island Bay Cycleway), and the Wellington City Council are committed to increasing cycling as a percentage of journeys taken in the city. The Lightpath in Auckland has demonstrated how interesting design can elevate infrastructure to an engaging space and talking point. How can spatial typography be used to encourage cycling in Wellington?  

09/10: Wildcard

(two solution required from the studio)

Choose a theme from the news today and devise a spatial typographical solution to communicate it.

The one that took my eye today was Cruise ship to Cablecar, so I got into a group with others that were interested and we went down to do the walk. It was quite interesting walking around the city and looking at it from a different perspective to usual. I was very aware of all the type/directions and looked at it from the point of view of not knowing the city and it definitely wasn't an easy thing to navigate to.

The things I noted as particularly interesting that there was nothing to really creat an impact at the start when they get off the ship (that we could see anyway), we were able to get a closer look at the map that they look at which looks like this:

This is something we will look into in more depth as a team but from an initial viewpoint we all liked the colour coordinating and the estimated times to get to each area.

The other notes I made was that the shelter was really under utilised - it has so much potential but has just been forgotten and let go. There was a lamp post every two trees along this first path. It is quite a long reasonably straight, and wide path to start the journey. But once you get into the inner city streets it's cramped and busy and if you aren't sure where you're going it's very intimidating.

We all took lots of pictures and agreed to meet on Tuesday at 9am to put our thoughts together and complete the homework.

Research

Whilst doing the homework research I also came across some other really cool spatial type examples.

This website has some great ones   http://theultralinx.com/2015/07/20-awesome-optical-illusions-typography/   although I will say that the whole paint perspective thing is a bit overdone! It is something I will definitely be staying away from! But otherwise my favourite from this page was:

I really like playing with hanging/suspension and love how something so minute and detailed appears close up vs from afar.

This website also had some really great things   https://wayfindingthesis.wordpress.com/   and some really different ones too. This was where I found the parking garage example, which I didn't like, but I really liked this one which used symbol as pattern and meaning:

As I was putting my own images into the Google doc for sharing on Monday I was also inspired by some of the images other students had gathered and saved them for closer reflection. They were:

Given my love of stairs - this definitely took my fancy!

This was just really clever - it's in a blood clinic and mimics the blood coming out in the tube and felt really fluid and inventive.

This caught my eye because of it's subtlety - the mirror idea is so creative and the other detailing in the structure is beautiful.

This was just cool because it's something I myself have also noticed and is a quirky take on the traditional man/woman shape as well as the use of letters and words.

Last but not least - this was cool because it's quite a simple idea - and quite easy/affordable to be able to generate.

Homework week 1

So in the first class, students had made gigantic letters with cardboard and stuff and they looked so cool - their homework was to take them out a photograph them in spaces to portray them differently - i.e. a 1m tall letter might look big next to a drink bottle, but tiny next to a building.

The other part of the homework - which was where I could start to get involved was to find two examples of spatial type - one as a navigational aid, and one as that created narrative/sense of place.

These were the 2 I chose:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/38203021/Blackout-Premiere

I found this project and loved so much of it - I chose this particular feature of the way-finding/spatial typography they had generated but there were so many other elements that were a part of this movie premiere that were equally brilliant. I picked this image as my placemaking/narrative piece because I love the dimension that creating stairs uses - almost like when you fold paper and draw on it, and then unravel it to reveal something else, the different planes the stairs create leaves itself open for so many angles and visual interpretations.

I chose this as my navigational piece for a completely different reason - I actually found this so overwhelming with all the different instructions bombarding me that I didn't like it. Especially considering that a user is taking in all these different visual cues whilst behind the wheel. There were elements I did like however - for example the sense of humour gave it a point of difference and made the signs engaging and noticeable, however the boards down the left hand side just completely over did the space for me.