People in big cities always feel anxious and stressed when taking the subway. They are tired and frustrated with the crowd. They are struggling for a living, for their family, for their work, etc. I hope the map I designed could release their pressure and create a sense that although we are all under pressure, life has different aspects, and it’s always colorful, just like the subway lines. We may go through one thing after another, just as we passed station after station. Whether they are good or not, they together create our colorful, abundant life.
For this encoding project, I was inspired by the Beijing subway map. Until now, the Beijing subway included 24 lines, all encoded by different colors.
The Beijing subway carries an average of nearly 11 million passengers daily, ranking first in China. The average commuting distance in Beijing is 11.1km per day, and the average commute is 47 minutes (one way) per day. That means if you live and work in Beijing, in large probability, you have to spend nearly 100 minutes on your way each day. You can imagine how crowded the Beijing subway is.
From the shown subway map, you can see Beijing is a busy and crowded city full of pressure, everyone, who rides the subway is on the run for his or her life. Passengers go through station after station every day; many people have to transfer several routes to reach their destinations each day.
That makes me think our life is just like the subway. We pass through one station after another, and each station has its meaning and purpose. There are different aspects of our life; each could be a color-coded “subway line,” and each “subway line” includes different stations. Those lines interlaced with one another and created a colorful image of our life.
In my work, I picked eight typical lines from the Map of the Beijing subway that will make people immediately aware of its Beijing subway. I continued to use their color codes, shapes, and the way they interlaced in my work. I followed the color code of the original subway map. It has a good organization of colors. Although there are 24 lines with different colors interlaced, which creates a strong visualization, each of them still has good readability, and they all stand out well. You may feel shocked when you first see the Beijing subway map, but when you look at it carefully, you may find the contents are not hard to understand. They are in good order and well organized with the design. It’s a good map for navigation inside subway stations. The use of color makes the difference.
Then, I chose eight aspects of life to present: our daily life, our emotions, our pressures, our ages, the experience of our life, our happiness, our annual ring, and our hobbies. Each aspect matched up with a line, with its color and shape. Each aspect will include eight things that are related to this aspect. For example, “our pressures” included: money, illness, family, degree, work, car, house, and being fired from work. I use icons to present those things. The same goes for everything else.
In my work, I picked eight typical lines from the Map of the Beijing subway that will make people immediately aware of its Beijing subway. I continued to use their color codes, shapes, and the way they interlaced in my work. I followed the color code of the original subway map. It has a good organization of colors. Although there are 24 lines with different colors interlaced, which creates a strong visualization, each of them still has good readability, and they all stand out well. You may feel shocked when you first see the Beijing subway map, but when you look at it carefully, you may find the contents are not hard to understand. They are in good order and well organized with the design. It’s a good map for navigation inside subway stations. The use of color makes the difference.
Then, I chose eight aspects of life to present: our daily life, our emotions, our pressures, our ages, the experience of our life, our happiness, our annual ring, and our hobbies. Each aspect matched up with a line, with its color and shape. Each aspect will include eight things that are related to this aspect. For example, “our pressures” included: money, illness, family, degree, work, car, house, and being fired from work. I use icons to present those things. The same goes for everything else.
Some icons will connect with specific sequences when appearing on the line. For example, the aspect of “the experience of our life” included: being born, studying, graduating, going to work, getting married, having kids, bringing up children, grow old. That’s the order of most people’s lives.
Final Design
The deeper blue circle and the lighter blue circle line in the middle are special. They are the two-loop lines of the Beijing subway. I purposely put some elements that represent the cycle of time. I showed our daily life on the deeper blue line; Wake up, eat, go to work, shower, and sleep. Those things repeatedly happened, day by day, and they could present the cycle of our time.
The aspects of the things I picked for this project are general because I hope everyone who reads this map can find themselves. The title of my map is called: “Stations of our life .”The audience could be passengers in the subway stations, and they could look at this map while waiting for the train. The sense of substitution could be strong.
