Restructuring Perception | Rethink Subway Map

Reflecting on the fact that while bringing convenient transportation like wormholes and fast cognition, the subway system and the shape of the subway map fold people’s perception of the city in a two- and three-dimensional way. Dominated by the power of space, it generates a difference from the traditional perception of the city, which may lead tourists, students and even daily residents to overlook other attributes of the city. This project aims to explore three representations of people’s different perceptions of the city.

Before, individuals always only knew certain 'official recommended spots' for landmarks views, auditory senses including both noise and pleasant sound were sometimes disregarded, while emotions posted on social media were confined to personal expression. Through mapping the places where people can see landmarks through object detection with 436,602 street views, mapping the soundscape and soundmarks through image segmentation and classification, and mapping people’s emotions in digital social media through natural language processing with 126,017 Weibo posts, this project brings out that the three dimensions could distort the subway map and form new wormholes for understanding the city, restructuring people’s cognition to the urban environment.