2. Hypothesis
We build personal transportation networks defined by
need, convenience and familiarity in our communities. Purposeful
exploration outside of our networks provides an opportunity to be
enlightened due to a heighten sense of awareness.
Despite living in an incredibly connected world where people regularly
carry a GPS enabled map there is a strong discomfort with being lost
furthering our dependence on directions and habits.
Exploration outside of our networks engages our natural instincts of
anxiety and survival making us more attentive of our surroundings
allowing for the discovery of unexpected associations, and new social
and professional opportunities.
Jenn Boggs 3.22.2013
3. Research Outline
Personal transportation networks
– Historic
– Current
Psychogeography
– The Dérive
– Existing case studies
Getting Lost
Opportunities vs Limitations
Design Experiment
– Design thinking: What is it
– Experiment
Jenn Boggs 3.22.2013
11. Works Cited
• The Grove Book of Art Writing by Martin Gayford & Karen Wright
• Change by Design by Time Brown
• The Situationist International: A User’s Guide by Simon Ford
• Psychogeography: Disentangling The Modern Conundrum of Psyche and
Place by Will Self. Pictures by Ralph Steadman
• Inner Navigation by Erik Johnson
• You Are Here by Colin Ellard
Jenn Boggs 3.22.2013
Editor's Notes
Uruk in Ancient Mesopotamia 2900 BC probabaly had 50,000-80,000 residents living in a 6km squared walled city. The city was built into 8 urban districts each with about 4oom radius or a 5 min walk.
Guy Debord– French, marxist theorist, writer, filmakers, and founder of The Situationist Internationala slightly stuffy term that's been applied to a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities. Psychogeography includes just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.Conflux is the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice. At Conflux, visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers and the public gather for four days to explore their urban environment. Conflux was founded by Directors Christina Ray and David Mandl in 2003. David Darts is currently the festival’s Curatorial Director and the festival’s Curator this year is Angela Washko.Broken City Lab is an artist-led interdisciplinary collective and non-profit organization working to explore and unfold curiosities around locality, infrastructures, education, and creative practice leading towards civic change. Our projects, events, workshops, installations, and interventions offer an injection of disruptive creativity into a situation, surface, place, or community. These projects aim to connect various disciplines through research and social practice, generating works and interventionist tactics that adjust, critique, annotate, and re-imagine the cities that we encounter.Windsor, Ontario
Theory of the theDérive1956"the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”Algorithmic walkingAWOLa guide for getting lost. It comes as a pack, consisting of a compass that doesn’t work, a simple poster and and a map that feature algorithmic walks, which always lovingly return you to your departure point – ensuring you can explore your surroundings worry-free.
DODO MagazineDrift helps you get lost in familiar places by guiding you on a walk using randomly assembled instructions. Each instruction will ask you to move in a specific direction and, using the compass, look for something normally hidden or unnoticed in our everyday experiences.As you find these hidden or unnoticed things, you will be asked to document them with the camera, creating a photographic record of you walk. Drift also keeps track of where and when you took the photos and makes your documentation optionally available for others to view through the Drift website.Serendipitor is an alternative navigation app for the iPhone.The app combines directions generated by a routing service (in this case, the Google Maps API) with instructions for action and movement inspired by Fluxus, Vito Acconci, and Yoko Ono, among others. Enter an origin and a destination, and the app maps a route between the two. You can increase or decrease the complexity of this route, depending how much time you have to play with. As you navigate your route, suggestions for possible actions to take at a given location appear within step-by-step directions designed to introduce small slippages and minor displacements within an otherwise optimized and efficient route. You can take photos along the way and, upon reaching your destination, send an email sharing with friends your route and the steps you took.GetLostBotwill quietly keep an eye on the places you visit. If it feels that you are going to the same places too often, it will send you a challenge. Foursquare connected.When this happens, you will receive a message with some mysterious walking directions. Follow these to discover a place nearby that you have never been to before!
