MIND Map

from the book: Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, Page 33-37 chapter: NO ADDRESS

“You must orient yourself in it not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience; here every discovery is intense and fragile, i can be repeated or recovered only by memory of the trace it has left in you: to visit a place for the first time is thereby to begin to write it: the address not being written, it must
establish its own writing.”

MIND map

For my collage, I asked my little brother (Philip, 11 years old) to describe his way to school to me. In fact, he couldn’t tell me the address of the school, even though he has been walking past the street sign almost every day for 5 years now. What he was able to tell me clearly, however, were various reference points, on the basis of which he has built up an orientation network over the years. I then took pictures of these reference points and created a visual representation of his cognitive map, thus giving an insight into his very personal wayfinding method. From this map, someone who has never seen these buildings probably cannot make much sense of it, but if one walks the route and consciously perceives one’s surroundings, then one can certainly find the way to the elementary school. I also find it interesting that I do not think of the same landmarks when walking the route in my mind, which suggests that also personal experiences along the way play a role in determining and memorising the route.

I designed the collage in a way that in the folded mode you only see the address, which you can then theoretically type into google maps, but if you unfold the map you see the visual directions and then realise that you can probably find the way even without a cell phone or GPS device.

I think that it is important that we also train our visual perception of the environment and the brain’s ability to navigate based on memory and associations and not always blindly be led around by wayfinding systems like google maps, because otherwise we will eventually become completely dependent on them, since we do not expand our cognitive map.