Background
Dérive, the application, strives to bring the concept of dérive into a modern application.
Rather than using icons to navigate the city, we let our perspective become an icon in itself.
Note than the core function of the app, the dérive, is unlike almost everything else we interface with on a device. Devices typically expose us to plans, like a birds’ eye view of a floor, that exposes logic, usability, and functionality. But, this view betrays the core purpose of a dérive, which is to wander and be directed, rather than to direct. This inherent desire to attune to the environment, rather than to plan or control it, best manifests itself as a perspectival view, or, the view where the projection of the environments adapts to the seer’s vantage point.
The design of the application is inspired by four great environmental designers: Erwin Panofsky, Jane Jacobs, Reyner Banham, and Lebbeus Woods.
Erwin Panofsky explored the idea of perspective in art and architecture . In Perspective as a Symbolic Form, he notes that perspective. Importantly, the idea of perspective contradicts the sense rationality as the sole determiner of human interest. Instead, personal bias and a wearing away of visibility take the stage.
Jane Jacobs rejected the notions of her time that cities could be “rationalized” like buildings could. She protested against the construction of a planned freeway through lower Manhattan, asserting that Washington Square Park, which would have been bulldozed, gave social capital to the city.
Reyner Banham introduced the idea of treating cities as ecologies. This inspired the app’s method of browsing through the city. Just as we would use sight and intuition to navigate ecology and ecosystems in the wild, we browse the city based on adjacent possibilities.
Finally, Lebbeus Woods inspired the graphical language for the app. His idea of architecture as a visualization and realization of conflict provides the perfect framework for an interface that seeks to integrate the user into latent conflict and confusion in the world around them.
Interface Features and Design Decisions:
Perspectival Views: the app avoids the use of lists, birds-eye views, and filtering. This is to establish perspective the principle medium of interaction, thereby mystifying the world and transforming navigation into a wholly subjective task.
Geometric Visual Language: interface elements either yield to lines of perspective, or flagrantly disobey them. This keeps the focus on conflicting forces in the city, and (hopefully) looks sharp as well.
Muddled Mappings: this is inspired by both the visual language of Lebbeus Woods’s work as well as Banham’s concept of urban ecology. The hope is that this paradigm will force users not to pick locations and wander through the city not by guessing based on number of stars or comments. Instead, the “free forms” and lines throughout the city could be based on ubiquitous sensing and unconventional sources of data pertaining to geographical areas.
Photo credits:
- Cover image: San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake, Quake City. Lebbeus Woods, 1995.
- Image in text: Conflict Space 4. Lebbeus Woods, 2006.
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