Believe me i’m very proud of finalizing TheFatLab’s everlasting website.. Not sure if you wanna know the whole story, but let’s say many have struggled (or dried up?) in the process. I did the whole design (btw the original logo belongs to Can Misirlioglu) and development (always on wordpress!). Be hasty and go to TheFatLab’s page!

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.

I worked with Nilüfer Kozikoğlu (Tuşpa) to design the report (who actually brought me to the project). Given the tight time schedule, we identified which topics to include and decided on how to visually clarify the information. We wanted the report to be in a presentation format so that it can be presented in meetings and then examined further afterward.

We acquired the data from various sources, including university itself and municipality’s web resources. Using textual explanations, thematic maps, charts and diagrams, we tried to put forward reasons why IU university hospitals should remain in Fatih neighborhood.

The project was developed in Processing environment and ran by three desktops. (You can find few images showing the installation).

The display at the top shows live twits on various keywords on congestion and traffic + a chart on how many twits are sent during the day. One can observe if twit contents are related to the amount of traffic or location, or compare if the amount of twits is related to the amount of traffic at a certain time.

Displays in the middle visualize live traffic on a gridded Istanbul map – left one shows European side, right one shows Asian side. Color coding deviates between red to green to depict estimated levels of patience (or mood). Note that the traffic is not displayed as a linear fact but as a vague space in order to approximate the effects of traffic towards its surrounding.

At the bottom, the display at the left shows information about the project, time and weather condition (because it also effects congestion in a particular way).

In the middle, a 3D gridded map shows aggregated traffic in the day, where mountains and hills on the map are slowly created by morphing the topology based on traffic. It can be read in two ways: To find out locations where most congestion happens during the day; or to relate time spent in the traffic to time spent crossing a hill or a mountain.

The right one shows daily notes – twits – on various topics regarding congestion sent by Deniz Erdem about her journeys in Istanbul and by me about personal opinions on daily life obstructed by congestion.

I would like to thank Ekmel Ertan for inviting me to the festival, Sadullah Uzun and Nihat Koçyiğit (İSBAK) for sharing live sensor data and being highly collaborative, Ulvi Kasapoğlu for his touch in the development of the project, and Deniz Erdem for the last minute contribution.

I can narrow down the design process to few steps:

- Explanation of basic concepts to understand complex setups and relations presented in the paper

- Sketching diagrams, illustrations and relations

- Determining the format and the content of the presentation (the poster)

- Sharing the progression with the rest of the workshop attendies

- Setting up the layout, refining diagrams-charts-illustrations, typography, color

I worked with Sululuke Platform to redesign (in their words “clean up”) their alternative urban regeneration plans and maps in the summer of 2009. Platform members worked hard on how to suggest a new urban plan for Sulukule against municipality’s own plan. My job was to make the maps more understandable and presentable.

Sulukule Platform consist of architects, urban planners, sociologist, archeologists, activists and many people from diverse background. The aim of the platform was to protest unfair and forced eviction plans of the municipality against Sulukule (a neighborhood in Istanbul where Romanian citizen used to live) and to suggest new ways of urban regeneration for the area. After lots of debate, with the effects of the press and international organizations, the municipality asked Sulukule Platform to prepare alternative plans, accepting that the original ones are not as good for the area’s unique culture and features. Unfortunately, the alternative plans were mostly rejected (and ignored) by the municipality itself.
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Most urban planners and architects would see these maps and explanation as a regular cartographic work but from a visual communication and design perspective, i find it suitable to categorize these works under information design, since my work was to make the maps and the explanations more visible and understandable. This is why i also attached the old versions – at least the ones that i could find.