Urban Media Archaeology 2010

I’ve always found it helpful that while in the process of constructing a project, it is important to document the stages you find yourself in order to have landmarks for your future research and also for an archival purpose.

The Pecha Kucha night was a breaking point for me. First of all, the idea of condensing all of my elements into a four-minute presentation was rather challenging. The goal is to state the angles and problematic of your work. It was very interesting how clear it became when I saw Manhattan’s map projected onto the wall. Suddenly it became transparent. I was being too ambitious. How could I have thought that I would’ve been able to cover the island of Manhattan in the little time we have? As Shannon pointed it out, I can focus on a few neighborhoods and therefore conduct a more thorough research.

After my presentation, Jess, one of the designers, suggested that I should take a more scientific approach to my project by only mapping the reasons why dead zones existed instead of mapping the dead zones themselves. At that point, I was a little confused and overwhelmed by the new tangents that arose during the class. To relieve some of this anxiety, I decided to send an email to Shannon to get some clarifications about these suggestions. Shannon underlined the fact that conducting this type of scientific research would involve expensive material that I cannot afford. Later on, Shannon helped me translate Jess’s suggestion into something more realistic. I need to focus on framing my project in order to avoid making any kind of generalization about cell-phone companies or about cell phones in general.

Finally based on all the feedback I’ve collected I have been trying to delimit by project. Here are below three decisions I have made since we met with the designers:

I have decided to focus on two neighborhoods for now: Wall Street and Times Square areas. They are both highly populated areas. Therefore, there are more cell-phone users. These are also locations where security is high due to the presence of American symbols that could become targets in the case of a terrorist action. These elements might interact with signal strength and dead zones.

I still firmly want to point out the dead zones because I want this map to be a useful tool to its users. Thus, I don’t want to impose an overly scientific angle because I want the map to be comprehensible and accessible to the people that will be using it. If my peers and my professor will be the only ones to understand it, I would’ve failed.

I will be focusing on cell-phone users that have the I-Phone 3G. It is the model of phone I have and therefore, it will be easier for me to proceed with my research. On the other hand, it will prevent any kind of generalizations feared by Jess. In other words, I won’t be stating that AT&t as a whole is untrustworthy.

Finally, the designers mentioned that it was better to focus on the content on the map rather than the format of the map itself. However, after given it some thought, I don’t necessarily agree with this statement. A map can have great content but be horribly conceptualized. Just like someone could have great feelings for someone but not express them properly. Both websites I found on this specific topic had great elements but in the end, were highly unattractive from a aesthetic point of view. In addition, it was quiet impossible to navigate on them due to a lack of clarity. I will then try my best to make it user-friendly.