The strange subway signs of Madrid (Notes on Navigation 2)

In a previous post, I talked about my Madrid trip and the experience of navigating with a guidebook as well as the relationship between carrying a guidebook and remembering a trip.

In this post, I want to talk about navigation signs, in particular how the subway signs I encountered in Madrid were so different from those in New York City*.

In New York, a subway sign will say something like this:





This means two things. To get to subway X, go left. To get to subway Y, keep walking straight.










Here's an example. The meaning, for anyone who's lived or traveled in NYC seems fairly obvious. (Image source.)







Now, this sign, usually means that subway X is to your left but to get to subway Z, walk down this staircase that that you see going down.









For example, check out the sign on the left. It points to a staircase going down.








This sign, however, means something totally different in Madrid, as I found to my astonishment. The subway X part is pretty clear: "go to your left for subway X". The part about subway Z is however interpreted as: "to get to subway Z, keep walking straight." When I saw this sign in Madrid, I paused and looked around me for a staircase going down and was surprised to see none. After about 5 seconds of looking around and realizing that no staircase could be found anywhere remotely close, I understood what the sign meant: "keep walking and you will get to subway Z".





For an example, see this figure (to your left, source here, the image has been doctored to change the name of the station). The sign is saying "keep walking along in this direction to get to Salida". There is no staircase involved (although that's hard to see in the picture).



I am going to discuss some implications and possible reasons for this difference in what the same sign means.

First, I think this is a great example of what is sometimes called the indeterminacy of writing as a representation**. We typically understand writing -- and what are these signs if not a form of writing? -- to represent certain stable features of the world and to describe them. A prototypical instruction set, for example, has a certain sequence of steps to assemble furniture or on how to accomplish a certain task using a computer program. Sometimes the aim is to make these instructions as "complete" and as "independent" as possible. We sometimes want these instructions to "stand on their own" and at still other times, this "standing on their own" is taken as the measure of the "goodness" of an instruction set.

The example of the street-signs of Madrid shows that instructions or signs or any kind of representation can't really "stand on their own". They need the world to give them meaning (or to "interpret" them) while they give meaning to the world at the same time. Stable features of the world don't really exist but emerge from the interaction of the sign with what it represents.

So instructions for assembling a piece of IKEA furniture make sense only when you look at the components of that piece and the instructions together. The instructions for how to use a computer program to do a certain task make sense only when you're "in" in the program. Subway signs -- the arrows -- don't have any meaning by themselves unless they're paired with the world they are supposed to represent. And as the example above shows, the "down arrow" can mean two different things New York and in Madrid.

Here's Agre on this:

The work of relating a text [in our case, the subway signs -- SAK] to a concrete setting -- looking around, poking into things, trying out alternative interpretations, watching someone else, getting help -- will generally be both "mental" and "physical", though it is best not to distinguish. Relating a text to a concrete setting takes work because the text might be relevant to the situation in a great variety of ways. The text has a great deal of "play", so that much of one's interpretive effort must wait until the time comes. This is the opposite of extracting a "meaning" from a text as soon as it arrives. The point is not that interpretation is wholly unconstrained by the text; rather, interpretation is constrained jointly by the text and by the circumstances in which it is interpreted.

Second, why does the "down arrow" come to mean two different things in New York and Madrid? Could this be a quirk of the Spanish language? E.g. perhaps in Spanish it may be more common to say "Stick to this path" rather than saying "Go straight ahead"? I am not sure and in any case, it doesn't seem like a good explanation anyhow (for which see below).




If you take a look at this page which has directions signs from many airports around the world (some are shown above). You can see that the Berlin and Istanbul airports have signs like those of Madrid i.e. the "down arrow" representing "go straight ahead" while Zurich, Singapore and Warsaw have signs like NYC i.e. the "up arrow" representing "go straight ahead". I don't think anymore that this has to do with "quirks of language". I do think this would be a fascinating research question: how did these simple arrow signs come to mean what they mean in different places?

Finally, here's a thought. If a gaping staircase does open up in a straight path in Madrid (as it does, say, on 42nd street in NYC when one walks between the 1 and the A trains), how would they represent it in a sign? I can't remember anything from my trip there so I would assume such things just don't occur all that much. But my hunch is that they would use a "down arrow", the same thing they use to show "walk straight ahead". This only proves further the indeterminacy of signs by themselves. A sign only means something when paired with what it shows. A "down arrow" above a staircase points to a staircase, the same "down arrow" when above a straight path tells me to "walk straight ahead."

Related posts: Notes on navigation.

* This post would have been so much better if I'd actually taken pictures of those strange signs. Alas, but no. Instead I'll be using diagrams and photos that I found on the web. Yay, Flickr and the Creative Commons License!

**For a good introduction to what this is, see Phil Agre's great paper: Writing and Representation.)

Notes on Navigation 1

One of the problems that fascinates me is the problem of navigation. Not web navigation, although that is interesting in its own right, but navigation in the physical world: how we get from one place to another, whether its on a route we already know, or a new route, how we make use of instructions and artifacts like maps. (Edwin Hutchins has, in Cognition in the Wild, looked at how groups of people collectively navigate at sea.)

Like Lucy Suchman, I don't think that to go from one place to another, human beings simply make plans in their heads and execute them. I think navigation is a complex activity, where many things come together: the plan that a person makes, the artifacts he uses like maps, written instructions as well as other artifacts like road signs all of them shape the experience in complex ways.

I had an interesting experience on a recent trip to Spain that is related tangentially to navigation. Now previously, when I went on trips abroad, I read a page or two of Wikipedia to find out what the noteworthy sites were. A best, I would write down their names, at worst, I would just try and remember the names in my head. The trips didn't turn out badly and I've always enjoyed just walking randomly on the streets of a new city without any particular destination in mind. But I don't remember much of these trips either. One of the reasons for this could be that I did not annotate the photographs I took immediately after the trip while the memories were still fresh. Another reason could be that I did not keep a journal of the trip. But I think there may be a third reason as well.

When I visited Amsterdam with a friend of mine, I noticed that he did things differently. He used a guidebook, a good one and usually planned to visit a couple of spots a day. No explicit planning was done, at least not in much detail but we always had the guidebook in hand as we walked around. We were always trying to map what we saw to what the guidebook said (well, he did the hard work but he explained it to me once he'd gotten it anyway). Just having the guidebook in hand, consulting it, somehow made the excursions much more informative. And more importantly, I remember much more of the trip! Even though, like the previous ones, I did not take photographs or keep a journal.

My hypothesis is that it was carrying the guidebook around that made a difference. Because we were always cross-referencing the guidebook, because our daily outings consisted of visiting a couple of locations in the guidebook, because even when we were just randomly walking the streets, our activity was directed: all of it had the effect of etching the details of the trip more firmly in my mind.

I got a chance to test this hypothesis when I recently went to Madrid for the WWW 09 conference. This time, I made sure that I did things the way my friend did in Amsterdam. I bought a guidebook for Spain: the National Geographic. I didn't plan on visiting too many spots on the same day, just one or two.

And you know what -- it worked! My trip seemed more substantial and I seem to be able to recall it better! Here are some observations on why and how having a guidebook made a difference:

• Reading the guidebook before the trip in detail proved to be unnecessary. I had time to just skim it on the flight to Spain and that was sufficient.
• It was much more important to have the guidebook with me as I was sightseeing: having it in hand, where I could refer to it easily, rather than keeping it, say, in my knapsack.
• I used the maps in the guidebook, especially on the day I took the Plaza Mayor Walk that was recommended. But the guidebook also helped me navigate the museums! The following point talks about how it did this:
  
• For the museum each exhibit is equally important. So one tends to get lost in a museum, getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff on display. The guidebook, on the other hand, will tell you what the important pieces in the museum are and more importantly, how to get to them (mine did, and I think a good one should!).
  
  • This meant that my activity as I went around the museum was directed: I was no longer just walking around but walking around with a purpose. I would continually refer to my guidebook to see where I was, both physically, and in terms of paintings/exhibits that I had already seen and the ones I still had to see. It was the same when I was walking on the road: my activity was directed towards the next landmark I wanted to see. Even if I was walking around randomly, it was still around a certain landmark.
    
  • At some point (this was in the Prado) my guidebook proved insufficient for the spatial navigation i.e. the instructions it gave me for moving from one room to another were outdated since the paintings had been moved around (obviously). So I picked up a floor plan, which had a map of the rooms with the painter(s) each room was dedicated to. I used the guidebook to find the next painting I wanted to see, the plan to figure out where I was and where I wanted to go, all the while looking at the paintings I was surrounded by to figure out which room I was in. -- it seems complicated to explain it but moving back-and-forth between these things proved surprisingly easy. I think a similar process takes place when we are trying to find our way in an unfamiliar place in our day-to-day life.
    

So where is this leading? Nowhere, really. And are there any takeaway points?

• One comes to mind: guidebooks should be designed keeping in mind that the best way for a person to use them is in-situ, in the process of sightseeing. And since my guidebook served the purpose so well, I am guessing they already are designed that way.
  
• For me at least, sightseeing became much more productive when it was directed than when it was random. I remember much more from this trip than I do from all of my others combined. It was because I had the guidebook with me so I had a name to go for every street I walked on and perhaps names help you remember better? Or to turn the argument slightly around, when I look at the guidebook today, after the trip, the images in my mind combine with the words on the page and the memory gets solidified. Or something. Sorry for the mixed metaphors but I haven't found a technical way of saying what I want to say.

That's all! More points about navigation to come later.