Movement Maps

After mentioning in my last post about how I had been mapping human movement through the site, it occurred to me that none of these maps have actually been included so far in this blog. This post is therefore to show a couple of the movement maps that I have created so far to demonstrate the paths that people take through the site. The first map I created was a path map that literally mapped the paths taken by people moving through the area. One of these maps looks like this:

This helps to show the more popular paths along which people travel. The image in the bottom right corner of this image is not particularly relevant to the image, as I added it to remind me of another event that occurred. I have been adding to this image every time I go to the site when people take more interesting and individual paths that I havent yet mapped. However most people follow those already shown. Another map I did to show this in a different way is the following map:

This map shows the same information but using block colour rather than lines. I chose to draw this as the site can easily be split up into rectangular and square sections as it is a relatively square area, and so I felt this was a suitable way of displaying the flow of people through the area. However this scanned image is not as easy to read as the original image as the different colours are harder to identify. The red areas are the areas used most, the orange covers areas used slightly less than this and the green areas cover areas where people socialise rather than walk through. There are also blue coloured areas which show areas used by transport and brown areas showing areas used even less than those already listed, but these are quite difficult to identify by this image.

These two maps show similar results and so it occurred to me that I could use Photoshop to overlay the images, which would merge the two ways of mapping the data enhancing the readings of both. The result of this is shown below:

By adding the paths to the coloured blocks this helps to show the different uses of the area and enables a better understanding overall of the flow of people through the area. I feel that the flow of people through the area is probably the main focus of this study and so the next step will be to continue investigating this in different circumstances and different ways. This will then eventually be collated to help make the model for this project.