The field of practice for Sarah Jones’ innovative research is urban wayfinding design. This contributes new insights to visual social practice. Site-specific to the Sydney city centre, Sarah’s research focuses on the pedestrian experience in the public built environment, leaving out all the private spaces, traffic signs, and systems. Urban wayfinding design has been a field primarily focused on a problem-solving process; however, Sarah’s practice-based research puts forward an alternative in the form of a storytelling-based approach.
Sarah’s work classifies the global, local and colonial historical influences on Sydney’s wayfinding systems and catalogues areas where a “local” identity could be developed from other perspectives. Identifying the disjunct between articulating the ecological history of the area and contemporary digital wayfinding and physical signage led to the development of a prototype titled Type Trails, which forms the practice component of Sarah’s dissertation.
Sarah focuses on the inner-city area of Sydney, in order to follow some of Australia’s earliest principal streets. Currently inner-city Sydney projects a colonial framework of names through its street signs. Jakelin Troy, a Ngarigu person, explains how Aboriginal pathways have shaped the city. Importantly, Dillon Kombumerri (Yugembir) and Danièle Hromek (Budawang/Yuin) also remind us, “We walk in the footsteps and live in the spaces of those who were here before and, of course, are still here” (2021, p.149). These walking tracks of thousands of years that became roads are traces of lived space.
In addition to the movements of “walking feet”, bringing attention to the original vegetation and natural features of this area, conveys a sense of how this area has been transformed over the last 200-plus years, of what lies beneath the city as undisturbed pollen or buried streams and what is left as remnant trees. Very little remnant vegetation remains in this area. The City of Sydney Urban Ecology Strategic Action Plan states, “Almost all of the original vegetation and other natural features have been removed or modified”. Apart from pockets in The Royal Botanic Garden Sydney and The Domain, the vegetation community has been completely removed from this area.
Sarah’s Type Trails is a locative, immersive, digital wayfinding experience that prompts users to consider the ecological and cultural history of inner- city Sydney and its influence on how we find our way. It reveals the hidden logic of the way we find our way around the inner city of Sydney by visualising and following past waterways and memory lines: an Aboriginal trade pathway (now George Street), the original coastline of Sydney Cove (Warrane), and the invisible Tank Stream. The project layers multiple datasets – including shifting distribution of tree and wildflower species – geospatially along these lines. Type Trails is a GIS map, so it can be used on any platform and currently exists online:
