Preparing for the Final Project
Since finishing 7-in-7, I’ve been taking some time to figure out what I want to work on for the next month or so. My 7-in-7 ideas initially seemed to me unsustainable out-of-context, but I enjoyed the theme I explored and I do want to continue working with it.
One of the projects I most enjoyed was my day two prototype - recording and mapping the actual colours of the city over a few blocks and contrasting these maps at different locations. This project was an interesting intersection of multiple fields I enjoy - design, architecture, history, urban design, data visualisation, graphics, and cities. Right now, my main idea is to try taking this project forward and exploring what else I can do with it.
I deliberated on these prompts as an exercise in class:
What are you planning to work on?
I would like to explore how we perceive colour in the city. I considered going back to some ideas I discarded to narrow my scope during my 7-in-7 and possibly explore how colour relates to other senses, but since colour is still primarily experienced visually, I might stick with visual perceptions of colour. I may also explore how emotions or connotations attached to colours affect their perception.
Why does it matter?
To me:
Like a lot of people, colour is a big part of how I experience the world and my surroundings. I colour code basically everything in my life, because the visual stimuli helps me categorise and make sense of things in my head.
To society:
Visual input and colours play a major role in how people engage with their surroundings, especially so in as sensorily stimulating a city as NYC.
Who else is working in this area?
I’ve come across a number of visual studies of NYC that I’m drawing inspiration from.
Like I mentioned in last week’s post, Data visualisation by Jill Hubley. She has a number of data recordings and visualisations based in New York City.
Heatmap by Strava, showing New Yorker’s favourite jogging and biking routes.
The population of Manhattan, as it varies with time of day and day of week.
Motor vehicle collisions in Manhattan, represented by colour and volume.
The Time is a dimension photo series by Fong Qi Wei, and the Time Slice series by Richard Silver, that explores places and how they exist in different moments in time, with respect to life, colour, and perception. Referenced in Felton, N (2016). Photoviz: Visualizing Information Through Photography. Berlin: Gestalten.
Research Questions
How colourful is New York City?
What does colour say about the character of a place?
Statement of Intent
I am studying colours in New York City in order to find out how they affect perceptions of the city, because colour is a large part of how a significant number of people interact with the world around them.
Categorisation
A lot of the examples I studied were working with more or less a single data category, but I feel like my questions would be better answered with multiple data categories - multiple colours, as opposed to just one. I’m still experimenting with how to work with these.
Perception
There exists a large difference - as with most design choices - between colours that actually exist and colours that are perceived. Then again, do those colours really exist if they are not perceived? My aim is to map colours as they are perceived by people. I might distill photographic recordings down to pixels to figure out which colours I should filter and represent. I also want to work with different times of day, because the colours we see during the day and the ones we see at night are vastly different.
Representation
I feel like a volumetric representation might work better and a purely two dimensional one, so I considered building the volume of the area(s) I will choose to study and representing only colour on the volume, but I was to constrain my study to only colour and I feel just the representation of the volume adds another layer of information to the project. The alternative is to depict only colour using volumes, but that is slightly tricker and holds potential for misinterpretation. I am still working on how exactly to portray information.
