A account of our ‘map cube’ trial

Here’s an account of yesterday’s trial of our ‘map cube’ which took us on a route from Limehouse to Bow Creek Ecology Park, via Poplar High Street, East India Docks, Canning Town and Trinity Buoy Wharf.

Over the weekend Gordon prepared a Storycube which described our route. The cube was produced manually, using screen-grabs from OpenStreetMap, with the primary aim of enabling us to perform a ‘live’ trial of navigating towards a known destination, (though without a defined path from start to finish.)   

in situ. We were struck by how our East-West walk might wrap differently onto the cube than a North-South or diagonal walk (eg from South West to North East.) We were reminded that the scale of the walk  - ie. the distance covered - has immediate and direct effect on the scale of the map that can be used. This has consequence for subsequent legibility, (and usefulness) of the map when wrapped onto the Storycube. In this instance, our walk’s ‘fit’ was adequate, though we became aware that a walk of greater distance would reduce detail in the basemap. We see this a limitation to the use of the cube within this project.

An incidental feature of the particular map that we were using was that town names fell in the centre of some of the cube-faces; we saw this as presenting us with a possible fix to both our navigational and map-scaling problems and began to discuss the merits of making ‘waypoints’ along the route more apparent. This quickly led us to discuss the merits of defining waypoints only, presenting them separetly from other map data, (which soon appeared superfluous or added unwanted complication to reading the cube in relation to the route and destination.) We decided that the waypoint alone could be the most important information to hold on each cube-face and quickly found ourselves taking about the merits of QR codes to hold map information of this kind. We imagined a QR code to link to a scaleable online map which would show, in varying, user-determined levels of detail the location of a waypoint.

Walking towards East India Dock we discussed whether the QR codes and their locations should be in a particular order - that is, whether they are six waypoints, including start and destination and four points along-the-way, or whether they might be six destinations, to be reached in any order.

Later, sat in the cafe at Trinity Buoy Wharf, we speculated on the experience that a walker might have in being presented with six destinations1 and the classic ‘travelling salesman’ problem. Given that our everyday walking is largely centred around following a particular route, and that the initial proposal for the project determined a joint-building of a cairn at one destination only, we decided to make a prototype, (a ‘QR Cube’) which would hold waypoints leading to a single destination.
 

Earlier, we had walked towards the Ecology Park where Gordon had chosen a possible location for the cairn. We consider this location to have its merits for the cairn-building event, being ‘off the beaten track’ and yet connected in many ways back to docklands, east to Newham and Canning Town, South to the River and North towards the Lea Valley and the Olympics park.

Photos show us loading stones into the paper cubes in order to weigh them down, to keep them in place.  We also discussed, (in another contrext) the biodegradability of the cubes, should they be left in situ.


Amplifying this potential for the project to become a ‘treasure trail’ rather than a simple map which made obvious the start and end and all points between, we also talked of the QR Cube idea as being able to reveal the route bit-by-bit or waypoint-by-waypoint. We toyed with the idea of having a QR code and a related, ‘heads-up’ image of the view from the waypoint, but decided for the next trial to use QR-only information and against the ‘illustration’ of the waypoint in advance of a walker arriving there. We are interested in how this will introduce an element of the ‘unknown’ and what this might add to the walkers’ experience of the ‘cairn-building’ event.
 
Today, Gordon mocked-up a QR cube, using Bit.ly, which works well on my Blackberry.
Our next step will be to automate the production of the QR codes and their inclusion into the Storycube PDF. We’ll conduct another trial of the QR Cube so as to reflect on the experience of following a unfolding trail and on defining the characteristics of a ‘waypoint’ within this project.

Avanti!


1. (Today, in thinking about the project and rolling a blank A3 cube across my desk, I’m also reminded that cube could act as a dice - and randomized destinations could be chosen from a simple rolling of the cube. For another project maybe…)