What I do is I organize information.

I'm a graphic designer.

Professionally, I try to make sense

often of things that don't make much sense themselves.

So my father might not understand what it is that I do for a living.

His part of my ancestry has been farmers.

He's part of this ethnic minority called the Pontic Greeks.

They lived in Asia Minor and fled to Greece after a genocide

about a hundred years ago.

And ever since that, migration has somewhat been a theme in my family.

My father moved to Germany, studied there and married,

and as a result, I now have this half-German brain,

with all the analytical thinking and that slightly dorky demeanor

that come with that.

And of course it meant that I was a foreigner in both countries,

and that of course made it pretty easy for me to migrate as well,

in good family tradition, if you like.

But of course, most journeys that we undertake from day to day

are within a city.

And, especially if you know the city,

getting from A to B may seem pretty obvious, right?

But the question is, why is it obvious?

How do we know where we're going?

So I washed up on a Dublin ferry port about 12 years ago,

a professional foreigner, if you like,

and I'm sure you've all had this experience before, yeah?

You arrive in a new city,

and your brain is trying to make sense of this new place.

Once you find your base, your home,

you start to build this cognitive map of your environment.

It's essentially this virtual map that only exists in your brain.

All animal species do it,

even though we all use slightly different tools.

Us humans, of course, we don't move around marking our territory by scent, like dogs.

We don't run around emitting ultrasonic squeaks, like bats.

We just don't do that,

although a night in the Temple Bar district can get pretty wild.

(Laughter)

No, we do two important things to make a place our own.

First, we move along linear routes.

Typically, we find a main street,

and this main street becomes a linear strip map in our minds.

But our mind keeps it pretty simple, yeah?

Every street is generally perceived as a straight line,

and we kind of ignore the little twists and turns that the streets make.

When we do, however, make a turn into a side street,

our mind tends to adjust that turn to a 90-degree angle.

This of course makes for some funny moments

when you're in some old city layout

that follows some sort of circular city logic, yeah?

Maybe you've had that experience as well.

Let's say you're on some spot on a side street

that projects from a main cathedral square,

and you want to get to another point on a side street just like that.

The cognitive map in your mind may tell you,

"Aris, go back to the main cathedral square,

take a 90-degree turn and walk down that other side street."

But somehow you feel adventurous that day, and you suddenly discover

that the two spots were actually only a single building apart.

Now, I don't know about you,

but I always feel like I find this wormhole

or this inter-dimensional portal.

(Laughter)

So we move along linear routes

and our mind straightens streets and perceives turns as 90-degree angles.

The second thing that we do to make a place our own

is we attach meaning and emotions to the things

that we see along those lines.

If you go to the Irish countryside and you ask an old lady for directions,

brace yourself for some elaborate Irish storytelling

about all the landmarks, yeah?

She'll tell you the pub where her sister used to work,

and "... go past that church where I got married," that kind of thing.

So we fill our cognitive maps with these markers of meaning.

What's more, we abstract repeat patterns and recognize them.

We recognize them by the experiences and we abstract them into symbols.

And of course, we're all capable of understanding these symbols.

(Laughter)

What's more, we're all capable of understanding the cognitive maps,

and you are all capable of creating these cognitive maps yourselves.

So next time, when you want to tell your friend how to get to your place,

you grab a beermat, grab a napkin, and you just observe yourself

create this awesome piece of communication design.

It's got straight lines.

It's got 90-degree corners.

You might add little symbols along the way.

And when you look at what you've just drawn,

you realize it does not resemble a street map.

If you were to put an actual street map on top of what you've just drawn,

you'd realize your streets and the distances -- they'd be way off.

No, what you've just drawn is more like a diagram or a schematic.

It's a visual construct of lines, dots, letters,

designed in the language of our brains.

So it's no big surprise

that the big information-design icon of the last century --

the pinnacle of showing everybody how to get from A to B,

the London Underground map --

was not designed by a cartographer or a city planner;

it was designed by an engineering draftsman.

In the 1930s,

Harry Beck applied the principles of schematic diagram design

and changed the way public transport maps are designed forever.

Now the very key to the success of this map

is in the omission of less important information

and in the extreme simplification.

So, straightened streets, corners of 90 and 45 degrees,

but also the extreme geographic distortion in that map.

If you were to look at the actual locations of these stations,

you'd see they're very different.

But this is all for the clarity of the public Tube map.

If you, say, wanted to get from Regent's Park station

to Great Portland Street,

the Tube map would tell you:

take the Tube, go to Baker Street, change over, take another Tube.

Of course, what you don't know is that the two stations

are only about a hundred meters apart.

Now we've reached the subject of public transport,

and public transport here in Dublin

is a somewhat touchy subject.

(Laughter)

For everybody who does not know the public transport here in Dublin,

essentially, we have this system of local buses that grew with the city.

For every outskirt that was added, there was another bus route added,

running from the outskirt all the way to the city center.

And as these local buses approach the city center,

they all run side by side and converge in pretty much one main street.

So when I stepped off the boat 12 years ago,

I tried to make sense of that.

Because exploring a city on foot only gets you so far.

But when you explore a foreign and new public transport system,

you will build a cognitive map in your mind in pretty much the same way.

Typically, you choose yourself a rapid transport route,

and in your mind, this route is perceived as a straight line.

And like a pearl necklace,

all the stations and stops are nicely and neatly aligned along the line.

And only then you start to discover some local bus routes

that would fill in the gaps,

and that allow for those wormhole, inter-dimensional portal shortcuts.

So I tried to make sense, and when I arrived,

I was looking for some information leaflets

that would help me crack this system and understand it,

and I found those brochures.

(Laughter)

They were not geographically distorted.

They had a lot of omission of information,

but unfortunately, the wrong information.

Say, in the city center --

there were never actually any lines that showed the routes.

(Laughter)

There are actually not even any stations with names.

(Laughter)

Now, the maps of Dublin transport have gotten better,

and after I finished the project, they got a good bit better,

but still no station names, still no routes.

So, being naive, and being half-German, I decided,

"Aris, why don't you build your own map?"

So that's what I did.

I researched how each and every bus route moved through the city, nice and logical,

every bus route a separate line.

I plotted it into my own map of Dublin,

and in the city center ...

I got a nice spaghetti plate.

(Laughter)

Now, this is a bit of a mess,

so I decided, of course,

"You're going to apply the rules of schematic design,"

cleaning up the corridors,

widening the streets where there were loads of buses

and making the streets at straight, 90-degree corners, 45-degree corners

or fractions of that,

and filled it in with the bus routes.