1937 and my children: January 2010

In some parts of the world they do not use street names in common communication for navigation, or for that matter, anything else really. Korea and Japan are two such countries, however China is mostly not that way now days, as far as I have experienced at least. I do not know about other examples but I am sure they exist. In any case, in Korea, we do not generally know the name of any streets and we do not use them to explane how to get places. This is a reasonably big change for me because all my life my world has been oriented about streets that have some nomenclature, a name or a number. So, in Krorea, instead of streets, they use points of significance, such as shopping centers, apartment blocks, or region names. Then for more granular instructions, people will say something like "walk towards the coffee shop then make your second left, then walk about 100m and we live just there." As you can imagine this sometimes ends in tears and yet more often ends in numerous phone calls and eventually the resident or a local going out and finding the visitor who is lost in the streets near by. In Seoul if you live 10 minutes walk from a train station, it is almost impossible to give instructions to a foreign visitor, but also in general. People thus often create meeting points, for example, "Lets meet at the 5th exit of the train station" and accordingly will show the way to their destination.

This system intrigues me for various reasons. It means that signs with content (as opposed to signs with infrastructure), i.e. what business is where and what building is where, are very important as they are the primary mechanism by which people can recognise a location. It also means that there is a very valuable body of knowledge held by locals about the local area and that people are more likely to ask others in an effort to use this knowledge. The interesting conclusion however is that this system is meaning based, as opposed to infrastructure based as it would be in most other countries. That is to say, everything known about where something is is also meaningful knowledge about the area around the something. In the infrastructure based system, we generally do not know what stores are where and what kind of apartment is in which area of town, instead we know a system of meaningless infrastructural information which lets us navigate alone, and generally not understand our surroundings. So, the Korean system encourages interaction and knowledge of businesses and localities while the street address system encourages isolation from others and from an understanding of any locality, in some cases, even one's own.

I think the Korean system has a distinct advantage, however it is hard for new visitors, especially foreigners, and it is probably a little slower than using street addresses. Similarly I think creating an abstract infrastructure reduces the movement of knowledge, a notable disadvantage. However, I think given an awareness of the Korean method and its benefits, I think places could be designed to optimally use this system, over simply instituting a crowded area, which as far as I understand, accurately summarises design principal currently in place in most Korean developments. Perhaps one example of a well designed system like this is Disney Land where many areas do not have infrastructural nomenclature but most places are findable due to the numerous destinations that people have awareness of.

What principals do you think we could use to build better location information systems while avoiding creating a separate infrastructure to represent the information?

The images attempt to depict the situation of navigation of several Korean cities including Daejeon, Seoul and Busan. Notice that image of a map does not include any street names but simply landmarks of some kind or another.