Gnamma #9 - Reading the Street

While differentiating "human-made" and "natural" landscapes is pretty fruitless, we can effectively make the distinction between objects designed for human legibility or not. Sedimentary layers in rock? Readable if you have some geology background, but not designed with legibility in mind. Some plants have co-evolved with animals towards legibility (appetizing and approachable fruit, say), but many require scrutiny. For the majority of humans on earth, the objects we deal with day-in day-out are designed by humans, for human use. Still, some tools are built to be legible at a mass scale (think: signage in a public transit terminal) while others are "expert interfaces" with steeper learning curves. 
 

 

Illegible or expert interfaces abound in the built environment. How can we "read the street?" to understand the processes that power urban life? What do we need to know to render this landscape of tools and messages legible? 

 

 

Brian Hayes' recent post addresses this: with a bit of background knowledge in power systems and electronics, essentially the entire architecture of an exposed substation becomes interpretable. Aspects of the form—i.e. ubiquitous sets of three—reflect utility (three-phase alternating current) and the process of converting in current and voltage. 

Growing up, I identified with the stereotype of "bored depressed midwestern teen," and much of my growing into adulthood has revolved around finding ways to get joy out of the world. This is to say, I'm interested in ways to feel a sense of agency and excitement in my day-to-day life, because this keeps me out of depressive modes. 

It's generally hard to get excited about something illegible, so the act of making legible landscapes has become of interest to me. Adam Rothstein's Rhizome article highlights lots of amazing examples of work around this. More recently, Jenny Odell's digging into a creek and New Public Hydrant by Tei Carpenter and Chris Woebken represent efforts to render urban landscapes legible. (Reading about plant biology and geology seems to take care of natural elements in the landscape.)  

Drew Austin's most recent newsletter highlights how standardization and digitization have allowed for huge investments in built infrastructure to vanish from population centers and civil legibility. If one of my values is to build agency in the world, then I hope that we can instead work towards public infrastructure that is legible to the point of appreciation, direct engagement, and sense of ownership. Ultimately, I think that increasing the readability of infrastructure and the processes that upkeep it is a way of celebrating our maintainers. 

I'll end on a quote of a quote from Shannon Mattern:

Kevin Lynch suggested that the landscape, through “graceful land management,” might open itself up to scrutiny and accounting. Planners might ensure that the “inner workings” of various “functional element[s] … are there to be seen if one is interested.” More specifically Lynch envisions “guidebooks to the sewer system, with instructions on how to read the season and the time of day by watching the flow. Signs, obscure marks, the traces of activity, listening devices, diagrams, remote sensors, magnifying glasses, slow-motion films, periscopes, peepholes — any of these may be used to make some process perceptible.”
 

How, exactly, to work towards this? We can begin, of course, with education. Beyond that, please hire me to work on your local groundwater routing system and we can start to figure it out with these thoughts in mind...

Rendering legible,
Lukas