Category: 1.2 Formulate

17/11/2020

To further develop my “Formulate” project. I decided to follow two different approaches.

First, I decided to use the information collected a week ago and present it as a different and unexpected way to know the city. For me, it was interesting to show not only the shapes that come out of a city’s grid but also the way they are drawn out and the atmosphere they are created in. That is why in the following videos, in addition to the process of “drawing”, the backdrop sounds are crucial to identify the essence of the city presented.

https://youtu.be/L_b8rsHs7oM
https://youtu.be/dPjWE88RLEw
https://youtu.be/9C4q3zRqKbk

On the other hand, I decided to push to the limit the method I had developed las week, but this time with special focus on three key elements: the origin (and final destination), the scale of the map and the duration of the route suggested by google:

Taking these aspects into account, I repeated last week’s process (drawing simple shapes taking London, Mexico City and New York City as background) but this time with little but significant changes:

  1. This time always parting from a specific location each time: The British Museum for London, The Templo Mayor Museum for Mexico City and The Metropolitan Museum of Art for New York City. All three of them being museums and being located in a fairly central area of each city.
  2. Using 4 strictly geometric shapes with the same edge-length between nodes (triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon).
  3. Drawing those 4 shapes with routes by foot, by bike and by car taken from google.
  4. Repeating those four drawings increasing the scale each time (20m, 50m, 100m, 200m, 500m and 1000m).

After this, I got the following data bank:

Then, taking that same other, I decided to take the duration time in minutes of each one of the routes and putting it into Excel:

And finally, I filled each of the cells with a colour, according to different parameters, in order to create colour patterns and, as a result, graphic pieces generated with Excel in combination for google maps.

In this way, the combined subvertion of Google Maps and Excel in addition of functioning as a new drawing tool, can help to distinguish the differences in time mobility within each city and compared to each other in a new and unexplored way.

09/11/2020

As part of my “Formulate” project, I decided to stretch the functionality of Google Maps, one of the apps I use most frequently. However, this time I wasn’t interested in knowing the location of nowhere or get the directions to nothing. This time I set myself to try to DRAW with Google Maps.

To get started I thought of simple shapes and if it would be possible to achieve them. I chose straight-line figures, so I had clear “touching points” I could refer to. Then, using London as a base, I asked Google Maps to give me directions to each of the edges of each figure as destinations. This way I got the directions to do each route by foot, by bicycle and by car.

The results were interesting:

After doing this, I wondered what would be the results if I did the exact same thing, but in a different city. So I chose two different cities, each one of them more different than the other: Mexico City and New York City. To do so, I followed the same parameters, including the scale.

For me, it was interesting to explore how mucho would these figures change, especially considering the very different conditions between cities, such as their layout and their relation to water (London has a river going through the middle of the city, Mexico City sits on top of a lake but no longer has a connection to it, and NYC IS pretty much an island in the middle of a river).

Finally, I found it captivating to compare each one of these options between each other and find out what happened:

So far, for me has been interesting to explore all the possible outcomes there can automatically be in Google Maps asking for a route and using the exact same points as destinations, only changing the way of transportation and the cities in question.