Waiting

Usman Haque points me at the Waiting project from 2002 by Frances Crowe and Josephine Pletts. I'm taken with this temporal topography investigation, which illustrates the differences in perceived vs actual distances of travel in London, and in particular the comparison between perceptions at different times of day.



The follow-up narrative sketches, Timescapes, describe integrating adaptive temporal maps into spaces for waiting:

I make a detour to the halo
which marks the location of
a waiting portal. I stand on
the temporal map as close to
the Highbury mark as I can.
The play of light from the
halo above describes the
temporal topography of
London.

I'm interested in the possibility of a walkable interface for my own temporal tube maps, and also the issue of how travel time and waiting times are intrinsically linked, which ties in neatly with thoughts on Dave Chatting's Ipswich maps too.

Real-time Ego-centric Isochronic Maps?

At yesterday evening's dorkbotlondon, Dave Chatting briefly presented his isochronic maps of driving times from Ipswich to UK coastal towns. Dave noted that river mouths open wider due to bridges being in-land, a nice result of his concentration on the coastline in order to accurately morph the whole island.

Dave's observation that travel time maps are dependent on time of day set me thinking about a real-time version of this kind of map. In Ipswich, if you miss the train, London edges further away and gradually contracts towards you as the next train departure time approaches. If you miss the last train to London, it will take you 6 hours to get there instead of 1 hour.

In London's real-time isochronic travel map, I imagine that destinations would overwhelmingly beat to the pulse of the tube: a 3 minute rhythm, you either have it or you don't. South London would shift in and out to the 10 minute beat of the overground network. In the small hours central london would relax momentarily, erratically phasing with the best attempts of the night bus services, whilst London's commuter belt would be repelled, only to be sucked in once more with the first trains of the day.