Through the Eyes of a Foodie

THROUGH THE EYES OF A FOODIE

U20144

The image shown below is in Figure 1 is that of a rough mapping of the area of Goregaon east in mumbai, Maharashtra. This mapping exercise was done to make us a bit more understanding about the ways in which data is represented in maps, this had involved various activities like going out of my house after a long while and mapping every single discernable feature i could find in the vicinity, including open ground, bus stations and even forest cover. I took this area because it was close to my home, so close in fact that my locality makes a small cameo in the map. Another major reason was because i marked out dynamic and static properties of the area for a good and accurate representation. It was quite an ordeal thinking about a valid static mapping as i wasn’t sure if any of my ideas were good enough to produce a good map. Then I had an idea, everyone eats food, and what if I use my in depth experience and knowledge of this area to show the best places to eat here as you can see in Figure 1. The second part of the process to make a base map of the neighbourhood, i,e, we had to trace our area from an image taken from google maps in either AutoCad or Adobe Illustrator so that i get a stencil to draw lines over. Although lots of people used Adobe illustrators, i was not able to use it as my licence for AutoCad had expired and therefore could only use Adobe Illustrator. Therefore i cant really do a comparison of ease of use but from what i had experienced in AutoCad previously, Illustrator definitely felt easier to work with as it was much easier to work with layers. The base map was the first time I saw my locality as a planned neighbourhood. The basemap had a basic info about all the buildings in the locality, although not marked out, with the help of the rough map (figure 1) and basemap (figure 2) and a general sense of comparison, we could accurately find all the different buildings that exist in the area and accurately name them to some extent as they can serve as important landmarks to identify the location of the eating spots.

Figure 1: My neighbourhood as a rough map Note. Notice that the different colours used in the map seemed very distinctive to each other and made sure that there was no confusion between the map and the background. Copyright 2021 by Swayamsiddh Dash Figure 2: My neighbourhood as a base map Note. Notice that the different buildings and the streets are represented in much more detail now, with more surrounding buildings also represented now. Copyright 2021 by Swayamsiddh Dash

The beginning of the final product started out with a huge shift in the medium that I was using to represent the map with, I went from representing the area in a 2D view to representing it in 3D view. I started out with a basic working of the area in sketchup, showing all the highrises and representing them as accurately as i could, then bringing in the streets that wind through the area of my neighbourhood. The first attempt as seen in figure 3 was the first attempt at 3D, with not all the elements of the area visible to the viewer but a general idea of all the buildings and elements that i wanted to represent in the area. The hardest part about this step of the process was to figure out how to show the various parts of the build and distinguish between the representation of Landmarks, Recreation areas and places to eat but, i finally ended up just using different colours for the location marker pins as it was distinct enough for a person to distinguish from a white and pale blue background. The second attempt at the base of the final map came out better in my opinion, with a lot more of the map being visible to the viewer, this was achieved easily by just changing the camera angle slightly into an isometric view. Now in this view, we could see the various parts of the map in crisp detail, being able to distinguish where the location pin is pointing even, which was kind of an ordeal in the last iteration. The Highway that runs along on the right side of the map is one of the most important landmarks we could represent as a lot more people know about the Western express Highway than they know about Oberoi mall.

The different recreation areas and open fields also became a lot more visible, now it was a lot easier to distinguish the shape and size of them, bringing in an even greater amount of representational ability.

Figure 3: My neighbourhood as a 3D map Note. The different parts of the map are now represented in 3d and location markers have been added but it is not very clear due to the view that we have taken. Copyright 2021 by Swayamsiddh Dash Figure 4: My neighbourhood as 3D map, now in a different view Note. The different parts of the map are now represented in 3d and location markers have been removed temporarily, but now the different buildings and elements are much more clear. Copyright 2021 by Swayamsiddh Dash

This iteration of the mapping representation where the product came close to the final attempt in any capacity, and also the first time the dynamic representation was visible on the map. For the dynamic representation in the map I went with showing the bus routes at different times of the day, showing the traffic density in the areas and also what routes the buses take generally at that particular time of day as people may travel to this place to eat food at the famous spots, so they require information abou the transport options.

The hardest part in this iteration was to find out the bus routes and timings for a particular time of day as I could not move out of my house due to COVID-19. Although I could not move out of my house, I found an app on the net that could show the routes and timings, even the live location of the buses in the area throughout the day with a very high level of accuracy.

Although identifying the bus routes had become much easier with the introduction of the app, the logging of these routes fell on me in the end, and it was very painstaking to document the movement of busses throughout the day and bring about the most accurate part of this map in my opinion.

In this iteration the map came as close to the final map as it could and also brought with it a new idea, The idea of representing the important elements of the map such as the various landmarks by highlighting those elements with the colour red. As you can see in Figure 6 the buildings are a lot more distinguishable now, with the different legends striking out for the viewer as soon as they see it. The bus route representation was also reworked and now the representation for car and pedestrian traffic were given new symbols for representation, namely with a small car icon. There was also an introduction of representation of the general flow of traffic in the map, showing in which direction the traffic generally went in at a particular time of day.

Figure 5: My neighbourhood as 3D map, now arranged in a A3 Note. The map has been duplicated 4 times and now arranged in a A3 neatly to represent both the dynamic and static elements . Copyright 2021 by Swayamsiddh Dash

This was the final representation of the map, with a huge overhaul in the arrangement of the different elements in the sheet, i removed the dynamic representation for 2 am as it was pretty similar to the one for 12 am and also because i required some more space to enlarge the map and show it more clearly, which required a lot more area than it previously had.

The title for the mapping was also finalised in this step and I went with the first title I had thought of. “A plate next to the highway”, is almost a clear link to an old tv show called “highway on my plate” which also showed the best local areas to eat, much like i have shown in my data mapping.

As you can see in Figure 7, this iteration also brought in the introduction of 3d models of trees in its midst, these 3d tree models showed the foliage of the area and told the viewer about the greenest areas in the map.

Figure 6: My neighbourhood as 3D map, now rearranged in a A3 with labellings Note. The map has been labelled about the various important elements, a red hue is added to important buildings and it has been partially rendered to make it much more pleasing to the eyes . Copyright 2021 by Swayamsiddh Dash

Figure 7: My Final Product Note. The map has been labelled about the various important elements, a redundant part of the dynamic representation is removed and now a final title has been added to the map . Copyright 2021 by Swayamsiddh Dash

Figure 1: Pin Your Interest Note. Different activities shown by specific icons, and the comparison of activity happening in day and evening are shown using different colours in the marker. Figure 2: Cognitive Map Note. The symbols and colours used for representing different area