Daniel Lara : Blog

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.

ENLARGE

Since 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:

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We 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:

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Parallel 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.

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This 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.

ENLARGE AND READ

ENLARGE AND READ

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ENLARGE

We had to pick a virtual place to explore and sample with the same rigor as a physical place.  I chose a diskette because I wanted to find out how it compares with other digital media.  Well, I found out that, since it has no connections to a network, it mainly behaves like a reusable piece of paper. This project was a dead end, but I became very aware of the importance of THE CONTEXT.

I chose to sample the Whittier Bridge that goes from downtown to Boyle Heights. It has panoramic urban views, a significant amount of tags and in the middle there is  an area where the homeless usually sleep. In order to discover something new about this place I started sampling the colors of the tags. While doing that I realized that the color of the bridge (the background of the tags) was made of painted patches over the tags, and that there were obvious traces of the battle happening between the anti-graffiti department and the taggers.  That battle was happening in the background, but it was larger than the personal battles between taggers.

Another interesting fact was the amount of crashes against the sides of the bridge.  In a week three accidents happened, and I did a quick forecast of the duration of the bridge. But even if I am far from the real rate of demolition, I was intrigued by the notion of the bridge being regenerated almost the same way cells regenerate in our bodies.

The team for this project was Dustin York, Scott Liao and me. We wanted to explore how people would engage with a familiar low-tec device.  People know that there has to be another person on the other side for the can phone to work. But what happens when the can starts talking to you and clearly there is nobody on the other end? Would you still talk even if you do not know to who? Is the nostalgia stronger than the usefulness?

There were walkie-talkies inside the boxes, and we were able to see from a distance when somebody was approaching.

The team for this project was Dustin York, Scott Liao and me. We wanted to explore the subtleties of a two way communication device. People were not able to playback the sounds that they have recorded, instead, they would play the recorded message from the other carbot, creating a chain of messages.  The result were systematic conversations that were very unexpected and surprising.