Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

This project sits at the intersection of the digital and the physical and initiates a critical enquiry into the ecological and cultural history of the inner city of Sydney in relation to how we find our way and orientate to place. The project proposes that wayfinding is founded on storytelling and memory-making practices that differ from the criteria prioritised in most digital mapping and wayfinding systems. Utilitarian digital mapping demands quick and efficient goal acquisition, directing, locating, and instantly connecting the user to the nearest amenities, transport, and local economy. The wayfinding experience of the prototype Type Trails involves getting lost and being immersed in this state and then re-finding the way. The project explores the affordances of the digital mapping program, Mapbox, its fluidity and zoom functions, to create a non-linear system designed to include a diverse range of literary sources. It responds to elements within the site-specific area of inner-city Sydney. Type Trails reveals the invisible memory lines of the original coastline of Sydney, the Tank Stream and the original Aboriginal trade pathways, with a primary focus on the flora, particularly the trees, and on what lies underneath, thus revealing the very beginnings of Sydney’s city plans and through this, the reasons for the ways in which we currently find our way in this area. This is experienced through words (typography), a typographical map which is the interface for a digital wayfinding experience. The result is a memory of a landscape, plotted over the actual one.