Initial Idea

For the first part of our chance project, we happened to look at surrealism and were intrigued by the concept of automatic drawing. These drawings were produced by automatism, the performance of actions without conscious thought or intention. Surrealists would draw this way to tap into their subconscious, and the products were curvy, dream-like and often contained long flowing lines.

When the next part of the project had us choose twelve locations using a chance process, we had the idea to take the flowing lines of automatisms and apply them to maps. We then walked the paths they created, as well as possible, to find our locations. We ended up exploring several in a new way by taking paths untraveled.

This exercise led us to want to explore the idea of detours. We felt detours related to our automatism walks as both take you off a beaten and intended path. We took our project downtown to try and get favorite places in the area from people, and how they might get there without using a regular route. To do so, we took all the streets out of the downtown area, and presented that blank map to our participants to get them to draw a direct route too and from their locations. Our intent was to then make detour signs, to take new people on the routes created by the people we surveyed.

The survey asked people to tell us a place to eat, a place to find something new, a place to relax, and a place that is special to them. We then asked that the participant would mark these places on our blank map, and then to draw flowing lines to connect them - disregarding the streets. Unfortunately, the cold weather made it difficult to survey people. We thought this may effect the want of people to take a detour walk as well, so we switched focus.

Final Concept

We liked the idea of creating a map from locations that people choose, so we decided to run with it. We took a large map of detroit, focusing on the midtown area, and came up with a process to completely remap that area of Detroit. Everything was taken out of the map, except for the highways and riverfront for reference.

The idea is that without any pre-established guides or references it allows for a unique angle of thinking, and a group would collaborate to personalize the Detroit that they want to live in.

We edited our survey questions to fit the mapping and give people a jumping off point. Those questions were, "What places are important to us," "what places are important to you," and "What do you want from this city?"

We wanted to keep in line with the automatism vibe, so on our information handouts there are hand-drawn lines. These are to contrast with the geometric feel of the rest of our design.

Color Studies

We first looked at colors from downtown Detroit.

Once we got out mapping process together, we felt that a simple pallet of black, white, magenta and yellow would work better with our maps. The colors are ment to reflect marker colors.

Type Studies

Our original idea was to use a friendly, hand-drawn typeface, but we chose a monospaced typeface to reference blue-prints.