Benedikt Groß

Metrography – London Tube Map to large scale collective mental map

2012 Feb

Nowadays our orientation is seldom based on the actual geography and their landmarks alone. There are a myriad of alternatives, from street numbers to GPS routing in our smartphones, to guide us to a destination. The feature that all of these wayfinding devices have in common is that they abstract the real world spatial arrangement. For us, the implications of this abstraction are two-fold: First, the simplification of geography translates into a filtering of information and context and second, the longer we rely on these wayfinding devices, the more we become accustomed to a curated geography. This is most prominent in public transit maps which distort the spatial dimensions of a city into comprehensible nodes and lines. These distortions have a major influence on our perception of a city’s geography, often times defining our own individual mental maps of space and thus becoming the collective representation of the real world’s geography.

“Metrography” attempts to explore this phenomenon using the most famous of transit maps: the London Tube Map.

Similar to the process of my MapMap Vauxhall project, all real world geographical locations of stations, railway tracks and thames riverbanks have been matched with the corresponding positions on the London Tube Map.

First video shows the mathematical deformation mesh, which is applied in the second clip to tube stations, railways and the river thames. Both videos start with the real world geography and blend then gradually over to the Tube Map structure.

With the help of the second clip it is also much easier to understand what the main deformations are. Basically the inner city parts are scaled up and the edges are compressed and marginalized.