Introducing: “Envisioning Information For Istanbul: The Study Of A Guide Design As An Urban Visual Interface To Improve Usability Of The City”. My MA thesis is about an instructional guide for Istanbul that tries to meet the purpose of “making the city observable”. It’s not a regular tourist guide, but an interactive manual on how to perform in Istanbul for a native or foreigner. The scope is on how to manage the design process and how to design the guide.

For a quick summary, this project offers a city guide system / interface that the user can create his/her own content. Not only for tourists, but for anyone in need of information about any subject: including wayfinding, points of interests, paperworks, research, instructions, transportation, etc… The idea is to develop a design methodology that can hold such information types together in one core. The sample images are scenarios that I delicately created to give an idea about the visual design, language, context and content. I preferred not to share all the details (conceptual, visual and technical) in this page for copyright reasons – though feel free to send an e-mail if you are interested. Please read on for more…

Since I’ve started working on information design topic, one of my desire was to create a guide for Istanbul – where I’ve born and am still living. The reason is that Istanbul is both structurally and socially -utterly- complex and difficult to understand. Most people describe it as “chaotically enjoyable” and i definitely agree. However, understanding (deciphering) the urban information is not an impossible but a challenging idea (and i adore informational challenges). So, I worked on how to make Istanbul more understandable, more “observable”.

The word ‘observable’ is important because it’s about comprehending the space that we are living and sharing with others. The fidelity of experiences that you can gain from a city – from its cultural identity to its urban functions / services, from its physical spaces to personal interactions- is directly related to the level you can observe / experience it. This doesn’t mean to reveal all the “interesting” surprises you can encounter (which is impossible anyway) but to encourage to reveal the hidden content more easily. To be honest, while I was working on these subjects, I was very satisfied to be able to focus on observability and experiences from the perspective of a visual communication designer; and then finding Design Quarterly issue #80 – “Making The City Observable” by Richard Saul Wurman encouraged me even more, since most of the things that I’ve been thinking on was described in his words. For anyone working on urban subjects or infodesign, I highly recommend you to find this issue, dated 1971.

On the research side, I mainly worked on conceptual background of the project – the relationship between experiences, information and design – and made an extensive research on existing urban information systems of Istanbul. To intensify the research, I arranged a private workshop with an interdisciplinary group of academics/professionals (Murat Germen – artist/architect, Can Altay – artist/architect, Kevser Üstündağ – urban planner / academic, Ali Cindoruk – graphic designer) to discuss related subjects.

On the practical side, the thesis is not about creating the guide itself but to create a guide on how to design such a guide. So what I did was a “guide on how to realize a guide”. In this sense, I focused on how to manage the design process and organizational plan. On the design side, I analyzed a great deal of visual materials that can be related to information design regarding visualization methods.

Since my aim is to show how such a guide can be developed, the visual part has – from my perspective – the priority. To envision this, I decided to work on case scenarios and created several of them – not randomly but through casual interviews with citizens. (At the top) All the images has explanations on what these scenarios are. In the end, I made a survey how users made use of these examples (including the ones with speculated data) and their thoughts on the system.

This thesis doesn’t offer a final product but an initiative of design. In this sense, content, visual materials and methods are subject to improve / change. Design is a process and this thesis is a start.