Thursday 25 February 2010

Tube Map

Have you ever walked miles on the underground to reach the platform to later discover that the one stop you travelled could have been walked in 5 minutes? If you're anything like me I have been waiting a long time for the tube map to be updated. Don't get me wrong - it's a truly marvelous piece of design, but it has a major flaw. The much celebrated tube map is not really a map at all, but a schematic diagram, it is geographically inaccurate and this irritates the fuck out of me.
For my new project I am investigating desire lines, wikipedia describes this as:

"A desire path (also known as a desire line or social trail) is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination."

This concept can be applied to everyday life, being the shortest path to our happiness, the quickest route to a certain place or something that generally makes our life easier due to a well thought out design. The tube map does not adhere to these set of specifications.

Anyway, all that said, here is my geographically correct tube map of central london:
Feel free to print out and use.

3 comments:

  1. I don't know how aware you are of the history of the Tube map and Mr. Beck's work on it, but if you have a quick look around the net there are dozens of alternative Tube maps including geographically accurate ones and also ones that list the walking times between stations.

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  2. i assume you know about this but: http://www.azullo.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/geo_tubemap1.gif

    xxx

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  3. A cool investigation into a fascinating information and interaction design area. Sure, this has been done before in various ways - that's not the point! The thinking and exploration is the key here.

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