I had one of those nights where I was only half asleep and my brain was trying to think about theory instead of turning off and letting me sleep. I kept thinking about why we do things versus how we do things. What’s great about thinking when you are asleep is that it gives you a whole new outlook. For example, in thinking about visual communication I realized that so much of what we design is an instruction set, a how to manual. My sleepy brain then decided that anything that can be limited to instructions could and likely would be automated in the future. I then started thinking about why we do things, I think this goes back to the mapping project from last semester. In the mapping project I was thinking about how maps usually tell us how to get somewhere but tell us very little about why we should go there.
The earliest maps did a much better job of addressing this question of “why leave where we are to go some where else” and “which places should be avoided all together”. One of the books I am reading, The Mapmakerss, describes how the Christian maps of the middle ages were based more on doctrine than fact and observation. While they could not be trusted for navigation they were full of use full information about the savage monsters and mythical beasts that inhabited distant lands. Of course the beasts did not really exist as described on the maps but they symbolized the genuine danger of the unknown. Although not very accurate from a cartographic point of view, these warnings as to where you should and should not go would serve as a useful distinction between known and unknown lands.
Some times I think it would be nice to have a scary monster on the subway map marking the high crime areas. In some ways the scary monster would be more accurate and based more on fact and observation than the dot typically used to mark a subway stop. I think there is more to describing a space then just positioning it’s distance relative to other spaces. Information that helps me anticipate the type of experience I can expect at a given location would be useful in daily navigation. I guess this question of why go typically falls within the domain of travel guides.