Final Map:
Alright folks. Uncle. If I had way more time to spend on this I would do it again in totally different ways. I changed the cars visualization and added more people. I also added the buildings back in for more reference. And a title. Thank you to everyone who helped me learn during this project! Happy nearly Thanksgiving!
Second to the Last Map:
My observation of the Southern edge of this shopping center became a study of shopping carts. The carts are a clear and visible force that goes largely unnoticed.
Individually, carts are very present in the lives of shoppers who need them to transport their purchases. Taken at the aggregate level, shopping carts represent a host of interactions: awaiting shoppers with the assurance of free hands for goods-gathering; under the command of satisfied shoppers heading to cars; returned to the parking lot “corrals”; and awaiting the next run from their holding pens.
Shopping carts are also traces of the people who pushed them. Carts end up dispersing into the environment. Some hasty shoppers abandon them in the parking lot, where they drift waywardly to settle across multiple parking spots, the cars seemingly repelled by a dent-circumference.
And carts end up clustered near bus stops and beyond, ranging far from their base of operations. How might the purchases of people in cars differ from people on the bus? For the next round, I will try to layer in a story of demographics of the people who live and shop in Bellevue, and how having a car vs taking the bus might indicate economic or social forces. I should be able to run some simple R code to get census tract data for the areas around this shopping center.
As for feedback – I could use it! I’ve focused on trying to get the forces – carts, people, cars and busses – to interact. Thoughts appreciated, and anything else you’d like to comment on!
*** Initial post ***
I’ve chosen the edge of Crossroads Shopping Center in Bellevue, Washington as my mapping site. For my first observation, I selected the intersection of NE 8th St and 156th Ave NE with an upper bound of what would be NE 10th had it intersected the shopping center; a lower bound of the south side of NE 8th St., and to the East, 164th Ave. NE.
For my exploration pathway, I crossed the Crossroads parking lot, then walked up NE 8th St, and took a side trip through Bellevue City Crossroad Park. On my way back towards 156th, I crossed NE 8th and walked along the other side of the street, passing by the United States Post Office, a discount grocery, and a gas station. On my way, I noticed forces at work on the space.
Parking and streets
One cannot escape the formative hand of the city of Bellevue and it’s commercial partners in developing this area. One way that is evident is in how streets and parking are manifested. The streets are very large to carry a high volume of cars and public transportation. There is no parking along the street. Instead, all of the parking is in parking lots that are made to be used only when you are shopping. The parking is plentiful if you are planning to do some shopping, and there are strict looking signs that govern the use of the parking lot. No walk-offs, no overnight parking. However, on my wanderings, I have seen people park along the periphery of the lots, and take a quick snooze before the parking attendants come through to shoo them away.
Garbage
This much shopping has to mean garbage. There are trash containers everywhere, somewhat hidden, but not really. There are some that are bigger and smaller, all kinds of trash in the form of old retail displays, pallets, and whatever other trash comes off of the steady stocking of retail shelves. There is also some garbage from election signs, and from people sitting on the outdoor benches and littering. But there’s not much garbage on the streets.
People
Pedestrians and ferrying them safely into the shopping stores is paramount. There are many features to keep families safe as they travel from a street or parking lot to the safety of the big box retail store, such as crosswalks and speed bumps. There are many types of people, shoppers, retail workers, service people, and some guards.
Shopping Carts
Shopping carts are a force all their own. They are emblematic of retail, a necessity to store and transport purchases to awaiting cars in parking lots. The carts end up everywhere, often on the periphery of the space, where those without cars have pushed them as far as they will go. Meanwhile, there are many attempts to store and organize the carts themselves, and specially built corrals for them to rest in before being returned to the store for another ride.
Public Transportation
The 245 and B line buses are the main way people get around if they don’t have cars. There are several stops that service this area. Around bus stops, we see evidence of Desire Lines, paths that have been cut through the planters that allow people the most direct way to get to the business end of the bus stop.
Nature / Decay
As with many city streets and commercial/residential areas, nature isn’t natural. it seems like every plant, bush and tree has been planned and planted. Even the dirt is carried in. No matter, the effect here in Washington is quite stunning, especially the trees. This fall, my first here, I watched with wonder for a month as beautifully colored leaves changed colors, fell in carpets, dried to a dry rustly crunch. Just this week they’ve become a sodden mess in the ensuing rain.
There are other signs of decay – small, soft pine cones afford rolled ankles for careless walkers; rat traps hint at the underworld.
*** second post ***
Six force maps
Traffic (plus roads and parking, all related)
Public transportation (not many stops, but lots of lines)
Nature (many trees)
Decay and waste (leaves and garbage)
People (where they frequent)
Shopping carts (strewn about, and collected)
Hi Tara,
Here are a couple of my impressions and interpretations from your final map.
– I LOVE that you delved into shopping carts and their location from your observations. Your map definitely maps something unique and contains information that has never been mapped before. It also seems ephemeral or time-based since I imagine the people and carts are constantly moving so to me, this map is like taking a picture of these elements at the moment you observed them.
– My initial thought is, where are these carts coming from? I read through your post and saw that this area is a retail mall, but that is not apparent from your final map. I agree with Annie that adding the mall back in is a good idea. If you are worried about it being too “distracting,” you can make the color just a few shades darker than the gray of your base map instead of the bright violet color from your force maps.
– At first, I was unclear on the distinction between “Ready to return” and “Ready to go.” When I thought about it more, I assume “Ready to go” are carts that are placed in a location where someone might readily use it to go into the mall. I would adjust the label then to be “Ready to use” or something to that effect, if that interpretation is right.
– Lastly, I think you can crop out the area on the right, since it looks like it is not part of your perimeter. I would do this if you don’t believe it adds to your map. If you think it does add to your map, I would make it part of your perimeter.
Overall, you’ve done a great job with delivering a clear message with your map. I hope this is helpful! 🙂
Hi Tara,
I like how you go deeper into the shopping carts, which was one force from your initial post, and it’s very apparent that you have done a lot of research and analysis to get to the final map.
I love the minimalism of the design of the map. It really helps emphasize your thought. I don’t really have to look into your post to be able to read your map.
I am sure the relationship of the people with the shopping carts on the map. I don’t see that many people icon compare to the number of cars and shopping carts? Perhaps they are mainly already in the mall, or perhaps it is not the busy day?
I am curious about the purpose of the darker shade area to the right side of the image? Does it serve any specific purpose, or it is just mainly the design element?
Looking at your map, I think you can benefit by adding some reference of some structure like the mall. This would provide a better geographical context of the area, although I know your focus of the map is shopping carts.
I like how you diving into a different level, by tying the demographics and social economic. I am curious to see how would you be able to depict them as forces?
Hi Annie, thank you for the feedback. You’ve given me a lot to think about! You are absolutely right. The people are IN the mall. I had taken the buildings down to match the negative space of the base map. I found them to be distracting in trying to get the forces together. I should try to bring them back up once I feel more settled on the forces. For the economic/demographic piece, I was hoping to do three callouts. One might be an abandoned cart and who its last pusher was. One is a cart at the bus stop, and another is being unloaded into a car. Q had an idea to show the value the cart represents, for example by having a bunch of carts “driving away” as an example of a family of four and their shopping habits. As for the darker area, I was trying to do one of those masks where I show the primary action in the lighter area, and include the darker area to show more dispersion, but make it clear that is not the focus of the map. Would love any other thoughts you might have!
Hi Tara! I love your choice of forces! Shopping carts and decay specifically are very much out of the box force decisions. I really enjoy how simplistic your base map is. As our fellow classmates have mentioned, I would say that on the first map with the traffic force, I was kind of confused on where to look since the map had bright red, green, and purple on the map. Do you think you would want to grey out certain parts that are highlighted, but not the focus? Or was it highlighted by design? What do the colors signify? Are you thinking about adding a legend? I think it makes sense for the green to be there on your nature force. For traffic, I think it would be great to see different shades reflect on the congestion of cars, or whatever else you can think of to tell us something about the traffic. I liked your note about how there weren’t many stop but there were many lines. I think it’s be cool to see all the different lines that go through there (different vibrant colors), but still manage to keep it clean. I think you did a great job pinpointing very interesting forces and displaying them on your maps and I look forward to seeing all the layers come together!
Hi Tara,
I agree with the feedback you’ve gotten so far about toning down the base map. When I was looking at your traffic map, I wasn’t sure of where I should be looking since I was getting oriented to what part was the base map and what had been highlighted.
I do love your force of shopping cart locations. It shows the not only how orderly the patron are but also the shops themselves! I think that Cindy’s idea of a heatmap would work really well for you on that one. Showing sort of “warmer” and “cooler” areas for collections of carts.
Repost feedback for Office Hour 11/8 (Th):
Design work has many big challenges and one of them is to capture time. Your Part 3 final map is to develop a final product that you are comfortable with, based on contingent maps in Part 2. Figure ground is a popular method, don’t be afraid to try “reverse figure ground” to identify information flow
Hiya Tara! I really loved how you so specifically delineated your boundaries in the area you’re looking at, and noticed details in decay such as rat traps (I didn’t even know that industrial ones looked like toolboxes like that, lol). I have a lot of thoughts and am just going to word vomit them out, hope that’s ok.
Shopping carts as a force is hilarious – a chaotic element where their end location is determined by people, laziness, and sometimes, the cart moving away by themselves. I know Jesse talked about icons being overwhelming, and I wonder if it’s possible to underlay a heat map or some sort of color saturation that shows the general area of most concentrated shopping carts to least concentrated areas as means of abstracting out that force so you have some room for some iconography.
Another way I was thinking about abstraction was some sort of black to green gradient that displays areas of greenery and decay? These can be color chunks with small dots of rat traps or dead leaves. You could make the green more vibrant in the park or areas that are aesthetically pleasing and kept up.
For public transportation, I still really loved your grey lines and circles in your first map. Since there’s only 3 stops, I feel like it’s probably not overwhelming to include three dots or the bus icon, especially since they’re concentrated in one area, so it doesn’t break the viewer’s attention by being scattered everywhere.
I find that icons often cause trouble if there’s more than a couple of items. It’s a nice idea because the interpretation is so direct but you likely need to move the carts so something more abstract. Per Serena’s thoughts this will help us see the patterns they create — orderly near the door, haphazard in the lot, perhaps lost forever beyond.
Hi Tara!
The force choices you’ve made–like the shopping carts–are really clever in that they reveal something important about the behavior of people within this space. I’m less curious about quantity of carts and more curious about which ones are left around haphazardly, and which ones are returned to designated locations marked by signs or structure. Maybe you can indicate this somehow?
It doesn’t feel important to me whether your icons are to scale or not. Since they’re representative of patterns, I’d say it’s more important that they are large enough to easily spot, and have enough contrast with other elements.
Along those lines, you might consider making the elements in your base map a little lower contrast– maybe faded or pastel colors. For your base map, you only need someone to get the general idea of the space. You’ve done a great job of keeping those elements simple, so reducing the contrast will redirect focus to your forces, which you can designate with higher-contrast colors when you combine them into a single map.
I also like your side note about “not many stops, but lots of lines”. How do you think this impacts people within the space? Is there a way to visually indicate how long it might take someone to get from a particular location to the bus stop? Or map frequency of bus arrival times and cross-reference? (For instance, if one stop takes most people 20+ minutes to reach with a full bag of shopping, but the bus comes every 5 minutes, that’s not so bad. But if the bus comes every hour, you really have to plan ahead!)
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I sorta just stopped on the carts because I was overwhelmed with the information in the map already, but dialing down background will help me work out the qualitative information. The shopping carts have places where they live outside their stores, there are corrals in the parking lot, and then they escape around the perimeter. Kind of like horses…
Tara, I love the “Shopping Carts” force, its pretty unique and fairly interesting, especially because theres always those 2-3 stray carts that are taking up half a parking spot. Only suggestion is to maybe change the color of your icons for them. I opened your map and didn’t see anything. I physically moved my head closer to the screen to see the little shopping carts. Maybe make them more bold or just jump out a little more.
Greg, that’s good feedback; I realized late Monday that I was going overboard on the second part of the assignment, so I sort of stopped going all crazy on adding the carts and the little corrals that they live in, and the ones that end up all over the parking lot. I am thinking green for them. I’ve also been wondering about how to size them / represent them on the map. Because the carts, the dumpsters, and the buses are all the same icon size roughly. I wonder if I’m being too literal. A lot of other folks have been representing forces as more dynamic sort of swirls and things…?