Abstract
“Public” is here treated by its three extensions: most broadly, from the merely extrasomatic, where users of representations are initially distinguished from makers, through ‘published’ or for the general public, to the governmental, official—where the discussion begins, before turning in its second half to the more common, middle meaning. What is public in these ways, “spatial representation”, also has the different meanings of representation of space or representation by spatial means, and there are several kinds of space to be considered. The styles of the two halves contrast, that of the first being an inductive mapping of neglected conceptual terrain of directive representations, that of the second linear: a continuous argument in answer to a question regarding descriptive spatial representation in the digital age. The common thread is the public as users of all such cognitive artifacts, and this use as interactive, with a range of implications for social collectivity.
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Notes
Plato, Republic X, 601de, author’s adjusted translation. Cp Cratylus 390.
van Natta and Canedy 2000. Ironically, its designer, Theresa LePore, stated: “I was trying to make the print bigger so elderly people in Palm Beach County can read it.” She did not test it on them.
Design Museum. “Designs of the Year”, 2013 (taken down): http://www.designsoftheyear.com/
Government Digital Services (UK) principles: (https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples)
Dunbar’s ‘social brain’ argument, based on Homo sapiens’ need for cooperative action, should also be considered horizontally, as he does with his “Dunbar’s numbers”. Good hosts and good waiters require broad horizontal ‘mentalizing’ powers regarding guests. Yet, even this approach does not specifically represent ordinary intentional reciprocity, as in Patsy Kline’s, “I know that someday you’ll want me to want you”. From Plato and Aristotle through Kant 1790, §43, artifacts were understood in yet another way, common to many cultures: in terms of art or craft, possibly implying a horizontal dimension at the maker level.
A paradigm of this essay’s emphasis on (user-based) design in the context of information displays—and therefore of the mixing of cognitive modes—is K/C’s shrewd (and at first controversial) use of Calvert’s lower case, curved, sans serif ‘Transport’ typeface for placenames on signs (Fig. 3, h), which allows easier recognition of names by their top shapes. (The GOV.UK site digitized Transport and adopted it for onscreen use, too, in their prizewinning 2012 reconfiguration.)
With apologies for adaptation of this phrase from its meaning regarding face-to-face communication, as in Gamble 1998.
Thus a current, at least heuristic, hypothesis of relatively separate ‘where’ and ‘what’ (dorsal and ventral) cortical information pathways in our brains, the ‘where’ being rooted in our current location, with ‘indexical’ functions (e.g. Goodale et al. 2006).
Some road and urban design seeks further integration through “signing and information when and where passengers need it; effective use of surface treatments, materials and lighting; and environmental interventions such as public art combining to create pathways, landmarks and destinations” (TfL (Transport for London). “Wayfinding” (http://www.TfL.gov.uk/microsites/interchange/82.aspx)), even Hans Monderman’s sign-free “shared space” pedestrian/traffic approach, “away from regulated, legislated traffic toward space which, by the way it’s designed and configured, makes it clear what sort of behavior is anticipated” (PPS (Project for Public Spaces). (http://www.pps.org/reference/hans-monderman/)). This involves travelers looking at each other rather than at signs, which eye contact reintroduces our theme of reciprocal intentional awareness.
That, unlike transit maps, road signage raises philosophical problems too large to discuss here, is indicated in comments by Monderman: “All those signs are saying to cars, ‘this is your space, and we have organized your behavior so that as long as you behave this way, nothing can happen to you’. That is the wrong story…. Who has the right of way? I don’t care. People here have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own brains…. Essentially, what it means is a transfer of power and responsibility from the state to the individual and the community” (PPS (Project for Public Spaces). (http://www.pps.org/reference/hans-monderman/)).
See Robert Macfarlane 2012. The title of §1.4 quotes Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass phrase, cited there.
A misleading term steadfastly avoided throughout this study is “convention”. The tube map’s user-testing over eighty years of social change, including war conditions, over billions of travelers, representing all states of life and mind, occupations, languages, cultures and parts of the world, comprises a formidably objective experiment for invariances under multiple variations.
It does so entirely free of mentioning truth or reality. We imagine things that are and that are not, the former pretty much as they are or not; things are as we imagined them or not, some come to be because we imagine them, etc.
For more careful definitions and further argument, see Maynard 2005.
Gombrich 1960: p. 25. The book was based on his 1954 Mellon lectures. Gombrich insisted that he was a historian first, of art second, and that he was a social scientist.
Given that his topic in Gombrich 1960 was why naturalism had a history there. However, ch. X is on caricature, there are numerous examples of cartoons, and pp. 234–237, 262–65 address our topic of mixed displays that include some depiction.
Unlike performance mimesis, depiction has the advantage of material survival—thereby also allowing, by ‘ratchet-effect’ (Tomasello 1999, p. 5), rediscovery and adaptation, ‘renaissance’.
See Gombrich 1960, ch., IV, “Reflections on the Greek Revolution” on the invention of point-of-view depiction.
Much inspired by six years’ wartime experience as BBC monitor of often faint, broken, noisy radio broadcasts: see Gombrich 1960, p. 204.
Besides whom, for Gombrich’s 1940s and 1950s work he cites Egon Brunswik and Edward Tolman, Wolfgang Köhler, D.O. Hebb and F.A. Hayek, then, increasing from the 1960s, J.J. Gibson. For extensive interaction with Gibson see Woodfield, R. (http://gombrich.co.uk/gombrichgibson-dispute/(2005)). Gombrich consistently presented Karl Popper’s ‘conjecture and refutation’ approach as representing his own. Later Gombrich (1984) cited R. L. Gregory, Julian Hochberg, Ulrich Neisser among others.
While Eric Kandel 2013 (p. 202) interprets Gombrich here in strict ‘bottom up/top down’ terms, with a Gestalt theory account of the former, this is misleading in several ways. Although not using these current terms, Gombrich was consistently skeptical about the dichotomy, and, while he did use Gestalt effects in that regard, was repeatedly critical of Gestalt theory (see Gombrich 1960, pp. 264f; Gombrich 1984, p.4).
“Reductivist”, so as to make a vital distinction from Kandel’s “reductionist” (thus modular) method, q.v. Kandel 2006, pp. xiii, 9, 201, 203f (“radical”), 245, 313, 372, 424—which, in my opinion, is lost by Kandel 2012, p. 508, marring his entire enterprise there. Ramachandran (2003) reductivist ‘neuroaesthetics’ ignores the distinction.
Gombrich’s emphasis on the “Beholder’s Share” in connection with the radical ambiguity of vision is a main theme of Kandel’s exposition of his views in Kandel 2012, pp. 205–213. For his engaging review of the early modular research (notably by Vernon Mountcastle and Stephen Kuffler, then David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel), see Kandel 2007, pp. 296–305.
Three observations:
1) For some qualifications regarding photo-depictions see Maynard 2012.
2) This argument can be made without the earlier reference to levels of intentionality, so long as artifacts are understood in terms of final causes, purposes.
3) The argument has significant consequences for most philosophical and psychological literature on depiction, which, shockingly, overlooks the elementary fact that when we look at pictures we notice that they are artifacts. Accordingly, the field abounds with pseudo-problems.
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Maynard, P. Wayfinding: Notes on the ‘Public’ as Interactive. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 27–48 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0211-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0211-6