Harry Beck's tube map is a design classic, but is it the most effective representation of the London Underground?
Since 2007, Ruth Rosenholtz, principal research scientist at MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and of the Computer Science and AI lab, has been developing a model of how peripheral vision works.
This image was created by Rosenholtz and her team, and is a "mongrel" -- a representation of how the brain perceives the whole map when focusing on Oxford Circus. Clear lines in the periphery make for easy navigation when piecing together a route and are a sign of good design, because "99 percent of your visual field is not high resolution", explains Rosenholtz. The Beck map is "really not half bad," she says. "Even though the Northern line is fairly far from where you're fixating."
A good result; so WIRED then asked Rosenholtz to make mongrels of alternative tube maps, such as the circular layout created by psychologist Maxwell Roberts in 2012. The verdict? "We are quite delighted by this curvy map," says Rosenholtz. "It violates almost everything that people think about subway-map design, but it's actually clearer."
Underground maps are a useful way of testing the model, as well as the design of a map. "What peripheral vision is essentially doing is measuring a rich set of local image statistics. It starts with random noise and then synthesises these images within each local region until they agree."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
