City Experience

Wayfinding

#1

When I was young, my mother once took my younger sibling and me to a puppet show event in Seoul. As I recall, getting to the venue required transferring buses twice and taking the subway with several line changes. The night before, my mother printed a simple map of the area around the venue on an A4 sheet of paper, writing down the bus numbers we needed to take and the names of the stations where we had to board and alight. She told us that if we ever got separated from her and lost our way, we should stay exactly where we were and wait without moving.

#2

(ref: On User Wayfinding - 1)

When I was young, there was always a map tucked away somewhere in the storage compartment of my parents' car. When navigating to a place we had never been before, I remember finding the name of the road we were driving on and the names of the roads beside us to locate our position, then planning how much farther to go and which road to turn onto. Taxi drivers could take us to any destination without looking at a map, no matter where we said we wanted to go—I thought that was an incredibly impressive skill.

#3

(ref: On User Wayfinding - 2)

서울의 인스턴스 던전들 Instance Dungeons of Seoul, 강정석

The article above contains an analysis by artist Kang Jeongseok from 2015, in which he draws an analogy between the emergence of artist-run spaces in the art world and the concept of instance dungeons in games. While the piece primarily focuses on the circumstances artists face as players in the art world and the activities they pursue within it, it also offers a meaningful analysis of how changes in wayfinding methods have enabled new forms of spatial experience, which is why I have linked it here.

All of the following excerpts are from the article above.

From the audience's perspective, the biggest change came from map apps, decent built-in cameras, and SNS timelines. ... In the past, you had to sit in front of a monitor, check schedules on Neolook or individual art space websites, ask acquaintances to set priorities, use Naver's directions feature to plan each route, write everything down in a notebook, and only then could you step outside (and even then, you sometimes got lost). But now, you can do the same process "on the move" through the smartphone in your pocket. ... People are influenced as much by exhibition photos and short comments appearing on SNS timelines as by recommendations from acquaintances. Upon arriving at the exhibition space, they photograph the scene with their smartphone's built-in camera and share it on their timeline.

There have been major changes from the perspective of space operators as well. Through SNS timelines, relatively easy and effective promotion became possible. As long as you have a decent logo, you can set up shop anywhere unexpected. You can promote whenever you want, for as long as you need, and slide into users' individual timelines in a friendly way. The time and cost involved have decreased dramatically. Thanks to people who enjoy navigating through the graphics of map apps, audiences started showing up even in tucked-away locations. It was under these circumstances that "artist-run spaces" began their activities. In fact, most artist-run spaces could be described as spaces built on SNS and map apps. Take "Space 413" as an example. Located in Mullae-dong, Yeongdeungpo-gu, "Space 413" sits in an alley among countless metalworking shops, and until you arrive at its door, there is no signage or atmosphere whatsoever suggesting it is an "art space." Without a map app, you would probably have wandered through the bleak factory district and returned home feeling rejected.

Also, since spaces now exist entangled simultaneously on SNS timelines and offline, even if the actual number of visiting audiences is small, a space can thrive on SNS timelines. You don't need hundreds of people for something to look like it's buzzing. If just ten people talk about it, it starts looking like an interesting event on individual timelines. If you fall for it, you visit at least once, and you share proof-of-visit photos.

An Ordinary Day

#1

I have earphones in listening to music, my eyes are on a game on the screen, yet my nose is breathing the air of the real world—when in human history was this fragmented sensory experience ever considered ordinary?

#2

What does my day look like? I leave my studio apartment, take public transit while playing a game on my phone, and head to another neighborhood. I go into a café, open my laptop, and get work done. When I get hungry, I search for nearby restaurants on a map app. After looking up reviews for several popular restaurants, I pick one and put myself on the remote waitlist. I do a bit more work, then go eat, take public transit back home, and open my laptop again to keep working. What spatial experiences were involved here? The first space to appear is my studio apartment. Next comes public transit. Then a café, then a restaurant, then public transit again, and then home. But if we shift our gaze just slightly from the spaces we can physically experience through our bodies, there are clearly other spaces as well. While riding public transit, I was playing a game. If I had been playing Brawl Stars, for instance, I would certainly have been moving my character through a map. I condensed it as "opened my laptop and got work done," but in reality, I was also roaming through Instagram, X, LinkedIn, GitHub, and various other sites under my accounts, gathering and organizing information, leaving posts here and there, spending my time that way. I consider the places where I consistently leave writing to be my "spaces." My body is simply not being used as the interface for experiencing these spaces, but some form of communication through comments and reactions is clearly taking place. Searching for a restaurant on a map app and placing a remote waitlist entry is a clear example of virtual space experience influencing physical space experience.

#3

Let us think more about popular restaurants in this era. Without smartphones, it would have been difficult to use apps, and without apps, real-time remote waitlisting at popular restaurants as we know it today would likely not have been possible. Without mobile phones, modifying a reservation the moment you left home would have been impossible, and without telephones, you would have had to visit the restaurant in person or send a letter to make a reservation—which would have been quite cumbersome, so people probably would not have made reservations unless it was a very special occasion. Looking at it from a slightly different angle, we might also consider the fact that in the days when remote queuing was impossible, specific restaurants did not attract crowds to this extent. People traveling from far away would have found it difficult to set a restaurant as their destination without knowing how many other customers might show up, so they would have gone to nearby restaurants that did not require much travel time, or to restaurants in safe areas where there were enough establishments that they would not come away empty-handed even if they were crowded. In an era when restaurant reviews did not circulate as widely as they do today, obtaining information about good restaurants would have been equally difficult, so people could have been perfectly satisfied with a restaurant that was reasonably good to their palate, and waiting hours to eat at a specific restaurant might have been considered strange. Perhaps the phenomenon of today's popular restaurants exists because of the gap between the number of people who can access information about a restaurant and the physical number of people the restaurant can actually serve? Waitlisting is an inevitable bottleneck that arises from trying to operate real-world spaces based on the logic of virtual spaces.