Sole Journeys is a design research project to study the thresholds of walking in a driving culture. It was made in collaboration with Alex Braidwood and Ana Ramos . In order to find out more about the walking habits and motivations of people, we started looking for an oblique strategy that would reveal information. Almost everybody in an urban setting walks in shoes and these become a kind of fingerprint. We decided to look deeper and scan the soles of the shoes.
ENLARGESince the scanning proved to be a surprise and an engaging experience for most of the people, we decided to structure our short conversations by adding a short questionnaire. This was partly based on our previous research on parking meters and distance thresholds. But after the first 17 interviews, we realized which questions were showing more interesting information and we decided to adjust the questionnaire:
ENLARGEWe also wanted to share the results of our project with the people that were curious about it. We designed a website where we posted the scans as well as other interventions shown below. We gave away cards with the website and another task in order to explore how much of an impact the scanning experience triggered:
ENLARGEParallel to the scanning, we took lapse movies based on walking rhythms. For this, an infrared sensor would trigger a camera each time anybody would pass in front of the device. If there was a lot of walking traffic, the movie would show smoother transitions. You can see the movies at streetbureau.org. We then decided to see the rhythm of traffic and pointed the sensor to the entrance of a parking lot.
ENLARGEThis is a snapshot of the website. You can click on the image to visit:
With the information gathered during our research, we developed the idea of a network based on walking. An open source device could be used to develop games, shared journeys or to track the walked or “unwalked” corners of the world, to name some examples.
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