Brienne Jones

[[Intro from JH and images TK]]

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Think of the last time you took a walk in a city park, let’s say Washington Square Park. Have you ever noticed those footpaths that diverge from the pavement, cutting across the lawn? While working on my thesis, I discovered that these things are known as “desire paths,” and in retrospect, desire paths feel like an apt metaphor for process behind my thesis. —BJ

JH: Could you talk a little about how you saw that translating to the printed page? Is the book itself a kind of journey for you?
BJ: I wouldn’t characterize the books per se as a journey. The word journey suggests that there is a beginning and an end, or a sequential progression, and it wasn’t my goal to make the books a linear reading experience. If the making of the projects themselves is an act of “surveying,” of exploring topics and methods, then the act of making the books was an act of mapping.

When I first approached the making of the thesis book itself, I was adamant that a physical book would diminish the work itself—much of the work that I was happy with involved space or movement in a way that I worried wouldn’t translate to the printed page at all. I floated the idea of submitting a tablet, but that would have created more problems than it solved. By the time I had reached this point, I had realized that fragmentation—of texts, imagery, experience—interested me.

I am generally interested in digital media, technology, and the web. After having been immersed in debugging several web projects, the many fragments that make a website (text, images, links) were on my mind. However, in working on my thesis, I developed a deeper interest in how places and situations are represented digitally, what it means when digital representations are the only way for a viewer to experience these places. I was also thinking about the fragmentary nature of maps, in that maps that look visually complete can only communicate a partial understanding of a place. Ultimately, this is why the book is in three parts. And is part of the reasoning behind book three.

In order to conceptualize this, I used ideas from geography and mapping, such as landscape interpretation, to make sense of the “digital landscape” that I was traversing. Doing so allowed me to explore what role a designer might have in both interpreting and creating “digital landscapes.”

JH: Can you take a step back and explain how this body of work, for you, began to veer from things like way finding and signage to more immersive personal experiences?
BJ: During my time at RISD, I did several projects about places. In general, I find “place” interesting—I thought about becoming an architect—and I valued being able to go to a location as a part of the research process. I did site-specific projects (e.g. signage experiments, interactive installations) and projects about places I’d visited in the past (e.g. a branding/mapping project about a site in Japan, a sound map of a park). However, as I got deeper into the thesis process, I began to do more projects on places in the news, based on my experience in Japan. Unlike previous projects, I couldn’t actually travel to these places, so I had to rely on the Internet to get information. I became more and more interested in how this reliance might be shaping the projects, and began to use the technology directly in projects (i.e. making a project using Google Street View directly rather than grabbing screenshots to put together in another format).

Through a research methods course, I had an opportunity to do a project about the remote research process. The project is called “Learning from Willets Point,” and in it, I set out to document what I could learn about a place by relying only on non-academic websites, the type of sites a casual reader might end up on, like Yelp, Craigslist, and Google Maps. Willets Point had been in the news: it was a small neighborhood of car-repair shops that was to be cleared for a new development, despite protests from local businesses and the community.

Given that there were competing interests—developers, planners, politicians, the people living there—I was curious about what impression I, a third party, could “get” from afar about this situation. The most fascinating discovery came through a comparison of imagery from Google Street View and Bing’s Streetside. The collected screenshots of the same main street in Willets Point are starkly different between the two services—Google had years-old, pixelated images taken on a cloudy day, whereas Bing had newer, clearer shots taken on a sunny day. In Google’s set, Willets Point looked dark, blighted, and possibly dangerous; whereas in Bing’s set, Willets Point managed to look vibrant and interesting, possibly worthy of repair.

Though the immersiveness of the tools (full screen view, nearly 360-degree images) and their positioning as mapping features communicate authority and neutrality (unlike an editorial shot in accompanying a news article), it was clear that these tools could convey powerfully biased impressions of a place.

Eventually, and through much reflection, three key “paths” through the terrain of my thesis work emerged: site-specificity (my survey of the “digital landscape”); legibility (typography, language and graphic elements); and “traversability” (exploring literal and figurative movement).

JH: Were there originally more that you rejected? And how did you narrow to three? I’d also like to hear more about the formal choices you made—type, composition, size—and how the writing itself evolved. In other words, let’s unpack your roles as author and maker a little …
JB: Each of the projects explore the role of immersiveness, ambiguity, (counter-)intuitiveness, and language in an effort to create—and disrupt—interactions.

Part of the spark behind this work came from a difficult experience I had when I was in Japan in March 2011. The most succinct way I can put it is that, at the time, I felt as if I were inside a cocoon of misinformation; it was difficult to what I could glean from Japanese news, what I was being told from outside news sources, and my direct perception of a situation. The confusion created by these parallel yet disconnected narratives thus created a truly personal sense of urgency, a sense that designers, as creators of digital artifacts, should be critical of the digital context in which they are working.

Finally, as for the form of the book itself, it came about in response to having to put all of this moving, physical stuff—sometimes websites or app ideas, sometimes large-scale sculptures—into a book format.

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By Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

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