Envisioning information for Istanbul: the study of a guide design as an urban visual interface to improve usability of the city

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1304495_(Table of contents)

This thesis introduces an online city guide design for Istanbul to facilitate daily life of its inhabitants and to render urban information reachable and observable. Different than a regular tourist guide in which the content is limited to information about points of interests or events, proposed guide intends to gather every possible information in the city within a single source and to let users create their own content. Like all the other metropoles, Istanbul too has a complex structural organization. When mixed with its unique and dense socio-cultural features, the resulting urban environment confuses its inhabitants while performing in the city. Consequently, interactions and functionalities that the city offers become frustrating or useless. One aspect of the project is to put forward theoretical and practical reasons why ''a guide to understand how Istanbul works'' is needed. These reasons are based on poor informal dissemination models or habits in the public sphere, and inaccurate design of information. Given the conceptual background of the guide, the focus is on how to create such a guide: How to manage the design process of the guide; What methodologies to follow; How it should / could look like. For this reason, a detailed research that covers visual communication design and urban design fields is depicted. Moreover, visual examples of several case studies are presented to better envision the concept of the guide.