Media Design Program | Art Center College of Design

Non-place

People Knowing

What is a non-place?

It was coined by Marc Auge to refer to places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places". Examples of a non-place would be a motorway, a hotel room, an airport or a supermarket.

In this assignment, we had to choose a physical and a virtual non-place. Based on the place we chose, we had to find the evidence of human inhabitant and use the information gathered as the source of the design materials. The physical non-place I chose was Los Angeles International Airport. This was exactly a learning by doing kind of project. Why? The direction of the project was entirely determined by the kind of information gathered during the research. You wouldn't be able to start the project before having materials at hands. Therefore, when I was on the way to the airport, I had no idea what kind of design it would turn out to be.

The virtual non-place I chose was the digital space inside a camera. It was the most direct connection I had with my physical non-place. As the materials of this project, I requested photos from friends. I asked each of ten friends to send me ten photos they had in their camera from a recent trip. The only condition was the photos must directly export from their camera. (At this point, the purpose of the condition was only to fulfill the assignment, but at the end it turned out to be a very crucial point in the design)

After information was gathered and analyzed, I found out there were many hidden and coded information behind it. For example, the baggage receipt might say TPE to LAX, but the barcode seems to have different information. To me, every sticker, receipt and barcode I gathered tells different stories. They might travel half a globe before they arrived here. Therefore, I decided to use the metadata behind these materials as my theme. The same concept was applied to the source I gathered for my virtual non-place too. The photos also had hidden data behind. Therefore, I categorized the sources and used all the hidden data and transformed them into graphic designs, which gave each of them a different meaning.

The entire design process was an adventure and valuable lesson. Research and Information gathering was not easy especially when it involved privacy issues. Another special experience was the open-ended characteristic of this project. Most of the time designers have to see a step ahead of the project, also clients need to know exactly where the project is heading, so there won't be surprise on the table. However, it sometimes kills great creativities at the initial stage. At the end, I like how the project turned out, but the experience I learned from this two-week experiment was much more important than the outcome of it.