Observing a Crossing: Mapping Movement, Sound and Public Space in Camden
1 Introduction
This study focuses on a crossroads in Camden Town. I chose this location because when I first arrived in London, I frequently purchased daily necessities such as food and household items here. There were also numerous street-side stores. However, in China, such street-side stores are becoming increasingly rare, and people tend to use shopping malls to get their necessities in one stop. Moreover, as I moved through this place, I could hear people using different languages such as Chinese, English, and French. Plus，the infrastructure here is also different from that in China. For example, people can actively press this button to make the green light activate, and there is a safety island in the centre of the zebra crossing. But such infrastructure and the flow of people speaking different languages are not found in China, especially in my home town. This made me think about whether I could further observe how people speaking different languages use this urban infrastructure in this space.
2. Research Methods and Experiments
In order to better document the architecture of this place, people’s movements, and how they utilise the city’s infrastructure during these movements, I chose to adopt Mitch Miller’s approach. To create ‘dialectograms ‘, which are illustrations that investigate the place from the ground up by combining observation methods drawn from the surroundings and people’s movements within this infrastructure. This method enables me to establish a deeper connection between people’s behaviours, regarding looking around, communicating, avoiding, pressing the pedestrian crossing button, and the infrastructure of this space, namely zebra crossings, safety islands, and traffic signals. Thus, Mitch Miller’s method can better assist me in summarising and generalising how people use this area.
However, only using dialectograms is not sufficient to effectively connect the various languages I heard in the space at the beginning. Therefore, I invited my friends to help me walk around in this space and record it using a phone to observe whether people speak different languages in this space. Combined with my dialectograms, this helps to better restore the specific use of individuals, vehicles, or objects for this place and can be combined with my recordings. To better combine my voice recordings and the people and vehicle reactions in this area, I chose to use frame-by-frame animation to better restore the people’s use of this public space infrastructure at that time. The supporting animation allows me to control the frame rate of the picture, thereby allowing me to check the sequence and duration, and compare this visual information with the simultaneous recording.
3 Conclusion
In this study, I realised that different people react differently to space. For instance, some people would use the traffic light button, but others would choose to run the red light, even though this might be incorrect. Design methods, such as dialectograms and frame-by-frame animation, not only document the city but also influence how I observe, interpret, and construct my understanding of the city.
4 Reference
Dialectograms.com. (2017). Mitch Miller | Words and pictures, by Mitch Miller. [online] Available at: https://www.dialectograms.com/.
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