4x3: Boston

We will embrace and explore this city and seek to create a series of projects that draws from your collective experiences of your time spent here thus far. This project will be divided into 4 parts. The content, broadly speaking, is Boston, and all aspects of this project will represent this content through the filter of your own perspective.

• 4 parts: Tour, Mapping, One Story, The Object
• Part 1 begins in class: two hours to develop a tour concept and photograph its stops, then the last hour of class to review

Part 1 — Tour Project

Photography · identity · booklet with map

A tour is often a good way to acclimate yourself to a new place. It helps you orient yourself and allows for guided discovery. Spend some time thinking about a tour that you would like to create in Boston. It can be something unconventional — a tour of wall paintings, bridges, security cameras, typography. Not a tour of the typical tourist attractions, in other words.

You will begin this project during today’s class. For the first 2 hours of class you must come up with a concept for a tour and do step 1, then bring the results to the last hour of class.

1. Photograph 10–20 locations (“stops”) on your tour.
2. Name and develop a logo or mark for your tour. The name and mark should draw all of their inspiration from the content of your tour. The shapes you draw and the typeface you choose should all have direct reference to the tour itself, through visual metaphor, color, texture, pattern and so on.
3. Develop an icon or marking system to identify stops on your tour. This would typically be a subsystem of your logo; it need not be a direct visual reference but should fit well with the logo.
4. Create a tour booklet that includes a map of your tour. Combine your photos, logo, marking system and map in one form, and consider the different approaches you might take to that form based on the content of the tour.

Part 2 — Mapping Project

Drawing · information graphics

Tours use maps. Maps are often conventional, since people generally understand how to approach a map. For this project, think about unconventional approaches to mapping. Constellations are an unconventional map of the sky. A table of contents or an index, while common, can be an unconventional map of content. Maps serve a purpose by illustrating all that is known about a place; in today’s world they are made by identifying everything. What happens when we create a map using only what we know?

1. Draw 2 maps from memory: your path from your apartment to CFA, and from your apartment to the BU studio. Include the landmarks and location names that help you identify the path in your memory. How would you give a friend directions with a hand-drawn map?
2. Find a map of Boston (physical or from the web) and superimpose your memory maps on top of this found, “accurate” map. A memory map typically identifies only the known, not the unknown.
3. Create an unconventional map of your favorite places or your favorite thing about Boston — all the coffee shops, say. Think of it as an information graphic, or propaganda, or a wayfinding system for children. You decide on the form, but push yourself to rethink what a map is and can be.
4. Create an unconventional map of all of Boston, rather than specific locations — made only with color, perhaps, or only with type.

Part 3 — One Story

Time-based narrative · storyboards · short film

You’ve been in Boston long enough to have a story to tell, or at least a story to make up. Your surroundings are more familiar now, but still new, still exotic. Stories are time-based narratives. This is guerrilla filmmaking: we don’t have the serious equipment, software or expertise for filmmaking, but how, as designers, can we tell a time-based narrative using what we know?

1. Develop a concept for a simple story and write a synopsis.
2. Create storyboards indicating characters, tone and key moments. Is it a dialogue? A third-person narrative? Documentary in style?
3. Create a short film or motion graphics piece using what you know — stop motion from a series of photos, type, sound and still images, basic digital video to capture tone. Don’t let your technical knowledge restrict your ideas. Embrace the constraints.

Part 4 — The Object

Object study · tiled poster · A5 booklet

Choose an object unique to Boston. Document and photograph it; be inspired by it and understand what it means or could mean and what it can represent. Can it serve as a metaphor? How does it represent or connect to Boston?

1. Re-present the object in a new way. Let the object’s purpose or meaning determine the format of your presentation.
2. Create a tiled poster inspired by the object. It may inspire additional content or become an icon for something else, but the object itself should play an important role in the poster.
3. Gather content and create a 16-page A5 booklet inspired by your object. Let the object inspire a topic or set of content; the content need not relate directly to the object, and a representation of the object need not play a dominant role.