assignment three: 

asking directions

in this exercise we will be attempting to apply kevin lynch's methods to the space of the uc santa cruz campus. as explained in class you should do the following.

1. stand at the edge of campus. if you didn't pick a position at the end of class time on wednesday, that's fine. just pick a position on the edge of campus -- or else in the center of campus if you prefer.


2. pick a set of destinations on the other side of campus. for example, if i was to stand in front the communications building, i might pick oakes college as one of my destinations. also, pick a few destinations in the interior of the campus. what we want to find is directions across the campus. some of your respondents will inevitably give you directions around the edges of campus. some responses like this are fine, but we don't want all of them to be directions around the outside of campus.


3. while standing at the edge of campus, ask people on the street for verbal directions to one or more of the destinations on the other side of campus. take notes. maybe it will be easiest to tape people with a tape recorder and then transcribe their responses later. or, maybe you can do just fine by writing notes on a pad as they tell you the directions. or, maybe you have a good memory for oral instructions and you can just write the directions down after you get them.


4. get fifteen sets of directions. you will probably have to ask more than fifteen people for directions since some people will not know the destination you ask for, or will not know campus well enough to tell you the way.


5. read the sections of lynch's book and note that he identifies five elements of the city:
   1. the path;
   
   
   2. the edge;
   
   
   3. the node;
   
   
   4. the district; and,
   
   
   5. the landmark.
   
   he has invented icons for each element. they can be found on page 145. when you construct your map, just use the top row (labeled over 75% in lynch's table).


6. look through the fifteen directions you received. try to translate what people said into one or more of lynch's elements. for example, "follow this road until you see the bay" might be translated into one path (the road) and one landmark (the monterey bay).


7. now, draw the icons you derived onto this map. some of the directions you received from people will be geographically incorrect and, consequently, they will assume -- for instance -- that parts of the campus are connected together in ways that they factually are not. that's great! these are the kinds of things we are looking for: where do people's cognitive image of the campus match (and not match) the actual geography of the campus. draw a series of icons for each of the fifteen directions you received. don't bother to try to average them out first and then draw the map (as lynch does). rather, just draw all of them out so that we can see graphically the sorts of overlaps that exist between one person's directions and another's. (8) put your map up on line so that we can access it via the web. next class meeting we will look at everyone's map and try to put them together into one map. hopefully we will be able to assemble a social -- i.e., cognitively aggregate image -- of the campus by adding all of your map-images together.