what i do is i organize information. i'm a graphic designer. professionally, i try to make sense often of things that don'tmake much sense themselves. so my father might not understandwhat it is that i do for a living.
scm woodworking machinery ireland, his part of my ancestry has been farmers. he's part of this ethnic minoritycalled the pontic greeks. they lived in asia minorand fled to greece after a genocide about a hundred years ago.
and ever since that, migrationhas somewhat been a theme in my family. my father moved to germany,studied there and married, and as a result, i now havethis half-german brain, with all the analytical thinkingand that slightly dorky demeanor that come with that. and of course it meantthat i was a foreigner in both countries, and that of course made it pretty easyfor me to migrate as well, in good family tradition, if you like. but of course, most journeysthat we undertake from day to day
are within a city. and, especially if you know the city, getting from a to bmay 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 portabout 12 years ago, a professional foreigner, if you like, and i'm sure you've all hadthis experience before, yeah? you arrive in a new city,
and your brain is tryingto make sense of this new place. once you find your base, your home, you start to build this cognitive mapof your environment. it's essentially this virtual mapthat only exists in your brain. all animal species do it, even though we all useslightly different tools. us humans, of course, we don't move aroundmarking our territory by scent, like dogs. we don't run around emittingultrasonic squeaks, like bats. we just don't do that,
although a night in the temple bardistrict can get pretty wild. (laughter) no, we do two important thingsto make a place our own. first, we move along linear routes. typically, we find a main street, and this main street becomesa linear strip map in our minds. but our mind keeps it pretty simple, yeah? every street is generally perceivedas a straight line, and we kind of ignore the little twistsand turns that the streets make.
when we do, however,make a turn into a side street, our mind tends to adjust that turnto a 90-degree angle. this of course makes forsome funny moments when you're in some old city layout that follows some sortof circular city logic, yeah? maybe you've had that experience as well. let's say you're on some spoton a side street that projects from a maincathedral square, and you want to get to another pointon a side street just like that.
the cognitive mapin your mind may tell you, "aris, go back to the maincathedral square, take a 90-degree turnand walk down that other side street." but somehow you feel adventurous that day,and you suddenly discover that the two spots were actuallyonly a single building apart. now, i don't know about you, but i always feellike i find this wormhole or this inter-dimensional portal. so we move along linear routes
and our mind straightens streetsand perceives turns as 90-degree angles. the second thing that we doto make a place our own is we attach meaningand emotions to the things that we see along those lines. if you go to the irish countrysideand you ask an old lady for directions, brace yourself for someelaborate irish storytelling about all the landmarks, yeah? she'll tell you the pubwhere her sister used to work, and "... go past that churchwhere i got married," that kind of thing.
so we fill our cognitive mapswith these markers of meaning. what's more, we abstractrepeat patterns and recognize them. we recognize them by the experiencesand we abstract them into symbols. and of course, we're all capableof understanding these symbols. what's more, we're all capableof understanding the cognitive maps, and you are all capable of creatingthese cognitive maps yourselves. so next time, when you want to tellyour friend how to get to your place, you grab a beermat, grab a napkin,and you just observe yourself create this awesome pieceof communication design.
it's got straight lines. it's got 90-degree corners. you might add little symbolsalong the way. and when you lookat what you've just drawn, you realize it does notresemble a street map. if you were to put an actual street mapon top of what you've just drawn, you'd realize your streetsand the distances -- they'd be way off. no, what you've just drawnis more like a diagram or a schematic. it's a visual constructof lines, dots, letters,
designed in the language of our brains. so it's no big surprise that the big information-design iconof the last century -- the pinnacle of showing everybodyhow to get from a to b, the london underground map -- was not designed by a cartographeror a city planner; it was designedby an engineering draftsman. in the 1930s, harry beck applied the principlesof schematic diagram design
and changed the way public transportmaps are designed forever. now the very keyto the success of this map is in the omissionof less important information and in the extreme simplification. so, straightened streets,corners of 90 and 45 degrees, but also the extreme geographicdistortion in that map. if you were to look at the actuallocations of these stations, you'd see they're very different. but this is all for the clarityof the public tube map.
if you, say, wanted to getfrom regent's 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 knowis that the two stations are only about a hundred meters apart. now we've reached the subjectof public transport, and public transport here in dublin is a somewhat touchy subject.
for everybody who does not knowthe public transport here in dublin, essentially, we have this systemof local buses that grew with the city. for every outskirt that was added,there was another bus route added, running from the outskirtall the way to the city center. and as these local busesapproach the city center, they all run side by side and convergein pretty much one main street. so when i stepped offthe boat 12 years ago, i tried to make sense of that. because exploring a city on footonly gets you so far.
but when you explore a foreignand new public transport system, you will build a cognitive mapin your mind in pretty much the same way. typically, you choose yourselfa rapid transport route, and in your mind, this routeis perceived as a straight line. and like a pearl necklace, all the stations and stops are nicelyand neatly aligned along the line. and only then you start to discoversome local bus routes that would fill in the gaps, and that allow for those wormhole,inter-dimensional portal shortcuts.
so i tried to make sense,and when i arrived, i was looking for someinformation leaflets that would help me crack this systemand understand it, and i found those brochures. they were not geographically distorted. they had a lot of omission of information, but unfortunately, the wrong information. say, in the city center -- there were never actually any linesthat showed the routes.
there are actually not evenany stations with names. now, the maps of dublin transporthave gotten better, and after i finished the project,they got 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 routemoved through the city, nice and logical, every bus route a separate line.
i plotted it into my own map of dublin, and in the city center ... i got a nice spaghetti plate. now, this is a bit of a mess, so i decided, of course, "you're going to applythe rules of schematic design," cleaning up the corridors, widening the streetswhere there were loads of buses and making the streets at straight,90-degree corners, 45-degree corners
or fractions of that, and filled it in with the bus routes. and i built this city centerbus map of the system, how it was five years ago. i'll zoom in againso that you get the full impact of the quays and westmoreland street. now i can proudly say -- (applause) i can proudly say,as a public transport map,
this diagram is an utter failure. except, probably, in one aspect: i now had a great visual representation of just how clogged up and overrunthe city center really was. now, call me old-fashioned, but i think a public transportroute map should have lines, because that's what they are, yeah? they're little pieces of stringthat wrap their way through the city centeror through the city.
if you will, the greek guy inside of mefeels if i don't get a line, it's like enteringthe labyrinth of the minotaur without having ariadne giving youthe string to find your way. so the outcome of my academic research, loads of questionnaires, case studiesand looking at a lot of maps, was that a lot of the problemsand shortcomings of the public transportsystem here in dublin was the lack of a coherentpublic transport map -- a simplified, coherentpublic transport map --
because i think this is the crucialstep to understanding a public transport networkon a physical level, but it's also the crucial step to makea public transport network mappable on a visual level. so i teamed up with a gentlemancalled james leahy, a civil engineer and a recentmaster's graduate of the sustainable developmentprogram at dit, and together we draftedthe simplified model network, which i could then go ahead and visualize.
so here's what we did. we distributed these rapid-transportcorridors throughout the city center, and extended them into the outskirts. rapid, because we wanted them to be servedby rapid-transport vehicles. they would get exclusiveroad use, where possible, and it would be high-quantity,high-quality transport. james wanted to usebus rapid transport for that, rather than light rail. for me, it was important
that the vehicles that would runon those rapid transport corridors would be visibly distinguishablefrom local buses on the street. now we could take out all the local buses that ran alongsidethose rapid transport means. any gaps that appearedin 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 runall the way to the city center, but connect to the nearestrapid-transport mode,
one of these thick lines over there. so the rest was merelya couple of months of work, and a couple of fights with my girlfriend, of our place constantlybeing clogged up with maps, and the outcome, one of the outcomes, was this map of the greater dublin area. i'll zoom in a little bit. this map only shows the rapidtransport connections, no local bus, very much in the "metro map" stylethat was so successful in london,
and that since has been exportedto so many other major cities, and therefore is the languagethat we should use for public transport maps. what's also important is,with a simplified network like this, it now would become possible for meto tackle the ultimate challenge and make a public transport mapfor the city center, one where i wouldn't just showrapid transport connections, but also all the local bus routes,streets and the likes, and this is what a maplike this could look like.
in this map, i'm includingeach transport mode, so rapid transport, bus,dart, tram and the likes. each individual routeis represented by a separate line. the map shows each and every station, each and every station name, and i'm also displaying side streets. in fact, most of the side streetseven with their name, and for good measure,also a couple of landmarks, some of them signified by little symbols,
others by these isometricthree-dimensional bird's-eye-view drawings. the map is relatively smallin overall size, so something that you couldstill hold as a fold-out map or display in a reasonably-sizeddisplay box on a bus shelter. i think it tries to be the best balance between actual representationand simplification -- the language of way-finding in our brain. so, straightened lines,cleaned-up corners,
and of course, that very, veryimportant geographic distortion that makes public transport maps possible. if you, for example, have a lookat the two main corridors that run through the city --the yellow and orange one over here -- this is how they look in an actual,accurate street map, and this is how they wouldlook in my distorted, simplified public transport map. so for a successful public transport map, we should not stickto accurate representation,
but design them in the wayour 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 greecefinally have an idea what i do for a living. thank you.