Moda Mapping

My project explored the physical response people have to stereotyping. I decided to attach a style stereotype to each area of London. I used the London Tube map as my basic imagery because it has become an iconic representation of an organized image of the space of London. Although this design is extremely helpful, it can be misleading about the actual geography of the city. Distance between places is distorted. The reason I chose to replace the names of the stations with style terms is because I think that the fashion of a place represents something personal about a city. People feel passionately if you define them as Grunge, Hipster, Preppy, etc. I wanted to explore how people would feel if I defined their neighborhoods by what they wore.

I took the central London tube map and removed all of the existing names for each station. With my blank map I wrote in my own names for each station. The names I came up with originated from my own observations as well as iconic stylish places that might be nearby. For example, Knightsbridge became “Harvey Nichols.” If someone said they were going to the Harvey Nichols station everyone would know they meant Knightsbridge. In a similar train of thought, Oxford Circus became “Topshop”, Aldgate became “Petticoat Lane.” Other places are less obvious, South Kensington became “Anti-PETA Territory,” Covent Garden became “Glitter Gardens,” Liverpool St. became “Suits and Saris.”

Some particularly touristy places formed a trio of Fanny Packs: East, West and Central. I intentionally kept several of the locations with their original names to help me to study how closely my unwilling participants paid attention to the papers they were collecting from me.

My first attempt was at Oxford Circus, the center of High Street commercialism in London. I brought an initial thirty maps to the Topshop corner of the street and passed them out to the shopping tourists. This evening forced me to reevaluate my process for the rest of the intervention. It was somewhat of a success in that I handed out the fliers really fast and everyone thought it was an actual tube map. The downfall of the location was how crowded it was. None of the documentary photos worked and I couldn’t see anyone’s reactions.

For my next step I went to Old Street. I chose this location because of the multiple entrances and the long ramps. Lauren and Marie accompanied me to record the outing. I had 70 more edited tube maps to pass out and a lot of hope riding on the outcome.

SUCCESS!

I passed out all seventy fliers at each of the entrances to the Old Street station. I was originally planning on using a blog to offer a forum for people to respond but it turned out I never needed it (that would have been plan three had Old Street failed).

People were responsive to picking up my fliers, which at first glance appeared to be merely a central tube map. Most of the people who picked up my fliers just kept walking down the ramp and onto the tube, looking at it the whole way. A few people actually turned back to talk to me about it. They just asked me what it was that I had given to them, why I gave it to them. I pretended I was passing it out for a friend’s project to see their genuine reaction.

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