Mapping Unknown Knowns: Sensitizing mobilities designers to mobile and lived experiences in physical infrastructures

Elisa Diogo de Andrade Silva, Ditte Bendix Lanng, Simon Wind

Research output: Contribution to conference without publisher/journalConference abstract for conferenceResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Mapping is often known as the entangled method of recognizing, representing and examining the existing physical conditions of a design site. Therefore, it becomes an evocative requirement to urban designers’ work in order to develop design proposals (Corner 1999). In this paper, we focus on mapping in relation to analysis, representation, exploration and design of everyday travelling in the city. Such ‘mobilities design’ (Jensen and Lanng 2017) concerns routes, sites and artefacts of mobilities, e.g., road networks, train stations, and bike parking facilities. Some dimensions of these structures, such as quantitative flows, materials, solid structures and others, offer themselves relatively easy to be analysed and mapped. But these transit infrastructures are an important part of people’s daily life for more that their efficient transport purposes. In these nodes and corridors, embodied mobile experiences occur through everyday journeys; social and cultural encounters, emotions, atmospheres and resistances constantly materialize and dissolve, merge and separate. As an important arena of the urban fabric, the designerly knowledge of such transit infrastructures should include ephemeral, less representative dimensions of travellers’ embodied ‘dwelling-in-motion’ (Urry, 2007) and experiences.

The paper foregrounds a ‘Mapping-in-Motion’ graphic example, an experimental urban design student assignment aiming to map some of the less representative dimensions of journeys between A and B in Berlin infrastructures. The further objective of the paper is to contribute to advancing mapping as an operational tool that sensitizes mobilities designers to less-representational aspects of the intersection between embodied mobililities and physical infrastructures. Structured by James Corner’s (1999) mapping concepts of ‘extracts’ and ‘plotting’, the paper illustrates how mapping might be analytically enhanced to identify, illustrate and heighten the non-palpable unknown knowns of infrastructures of the city.
Original languageEnglish
Publication date29 Nov 2016
Publication statusPublished - 29 Nov 2016
EventC-MUS Conference: Material mobilities - Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark
Duration: 29 Nov 201630 Nov 2016
http://www.c-mus.aau.dk/conference

Conference

ConferenceC-MUS Conference: Material mobilities
LocationAalborg University
Country/TerritoryDenmark
CityAalborg
Period29/11/201630/11/2016
Internet address

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