Design Studio 1 - Actions¶
Avinguda Diagonal Emdbodied Dérive¶
A counter-mapping dérive charting the felt texture of Avinguda Diagonal through embodied attention and an absurd navigation constraint.
Conceptual Statement
This action investigates what happens when navigation is stripped of digital mediation and constrained to a single continuous path. Instead of being guided by algorithms, I submitted my movement to Barcelona’s Avinguda Diagonal, an urban shortcut that, like a navigation app, prioritizes efficiency and straight-line logic. By walking its full 11km length without ever leaving the street, I tested how this highly optimized form of movement shapes my attention, perception, and decision making.
Navigation apps offer certainty but flatten experience; they obscure the spontaneous and embodied qualities of both city and self. This dérive creates a map of things Google Maps could never tell you, grounding each pin in my own lived sensations rather than commercial establishments, tourist destinations, or other cultural points of interest.
Embodied Map of Avinguda Diagonal
Audiovisual Essay
Dérive Rules¶
RULE 1: NEVER LEAVE DIAGONAL
- You may enter spaces that open directly onto Diagonal (shops, lobbies, courtyards), but you must return to Diagonal in the same place.
- You cannot turn onto another street.
- You walk Diagonal from end to end as a continuous line.
RULE 2: THE DERIVE CONTINUES UNTIL YOU REACH THE OTHER END OF DIAGONAL
RULE 3: DO NOT OPEN A NAVIGATION MAP FOR THE ENTIRE DURATION
Things to Keep in Mind:
- Use your phone as little as possible except using the Shortcut and camera
- Move at your natural pace
- No optimizing time or speed
- Follow your body’s impulses, not logic
- Document only when triggered, not constantly
DOCUMENTATION RULES:
LAYER 1 — Temporal Anchors
Set a timer to go off every 20 minutes.
When your timer goes off, trigger the shortcut and record audio describing:
- what your attention is on
- what sensation is dominant
- how your body feels
- Take one 10-30 sec video
LAYER 2 — Attention Pull
Trigger the shortcut whenever you feel a strong pull.
(Optional) Take a 5–10 sec close-up video of the thing that pulled you.
“Strong Pulls” can be defined as a:
A. Sensory pull (examples):
- sudden smell
- change of temperature
- shift in sound
- unusual light/shadow
- texture you notice
B. Emotional pull (examples):
- curiosity
- unease
- comfort
- disgust
- memory flash
C. Cognitive pull (examples):
- “I want to look closer”
- “I didn’t expect that”
- “That’s strange”
LAYER 3 — Interior Incursions
Enter an interior space ONLY when you experience a clear “invitation cue” (examples):
- door is open
- smell or sound spilling out
- warm/cool air hitting you
- someone beckoning you inside
- the thought: “What’s in there?
When you enter: - Trigger the shortcut - Return directly to Diagonal at the same point
ENDING RITUAL
When you reach the end of Diagonal do a closing audio note describing:
- how your attention changed throughout the Dérive
- what surprised you during the Dérive
- what Diagonal felt like as a continuous line
- Stop documentation. Let it settle. Ride a bike home and watch the sunset.
Reflection¶
My first-person research gave me three big takeaways.
1) I outsource a huge amount of my decisions to Google Maps, especially to reviews written by complete strangers whose tastes might vary wildly from my own, who I’ll likeley never meet.
2) I follow the same digital and physical pathways and architectures over and over again. Following these paths give me a sense of certainty, but feels rigid and comes at the cost of spontaneity and mystery.
3) When I use my phone in these ways, I often end up in a kind of digital intoxication. I lose a sense of myself and feel disembodied.
My first action, the social dérive, came out of trying to address the first two observations. It was a mix of bringing back a sense of wandering and also humanizing the recommendations I usually search for online. A few things stood out: it’s way easier to look at reviews than to ask people in person, it felt way more uncomfortable to ask a random stranger for a recommendation than to read something online, and doing it in person was more fun but somehow felt less reliable than clicking on a five-start review.
My second action was this Diagonal dérive. I tried to address the last two observations from my 1pp research. I had been thinking a lot about the power of constraints, so I decided to walk across the entire city while only staying on Avinguda Diagonal. It felt like the right way to flip my earlier 1pp research: instead of logging all the times my phone grabbed my attention, I used the phone to log all the times things in the world grabbed my attention. It was a way to see what happens to my attention when it’s not digitally mediated, but is still shaped by a single fixed rule.
I designed the whole protocol to pull my attention back towards my body. The rule of only dropping pins when something pulled me, and the idea of building a counter-map of details you’d never find on Google Maps, were both meant to foreground embodiment. Even the Shortcut was built to be as minimally invasive as possible. All I had to do was tap the phone to log my location and start a voice memo, so I didn’t have to look at the screen and have it become the center of the experience.
At the start, my attention felt about 70/30 external to internal. But as the walk went on, I actually became hyper-aware of my internal sensations. That surprised me. I expected to get pulled into tiny architectural details or textures on the sidewalk, but instead I kept noticing parts of my body I don’t normally feel on a walk. Then my attention would swing back outward depending on what was happening around me.
By the end, the dérive looped directly back into what I learned from my 1pp research, but with a twist. The absurdity of following one 11km street across the whole city let me drop deeper into myself at times, but it also ironed out a lot of the spontaneity I usually crave. It was both grounding and flattening. It reminded me of the way I use my phone: it gives me the quickest route, but it often thins out the experience. Walking Diagonal felt similar: helpful in one sense, limiting in another. There were stretches where the constraint made my surroundings feel alive, and stretches where it boxed me in and I wanted to escape. It made me realize that efficiency is great in doses, but what I want more than anything is room to drift, wander, and let mystery back in.
Downloadable Shortcut: Click here! It’s only available on iOS right now.
Steps to Making the Shortcut Work: There are a few steps after downloading the shortcut to make it work correctly. If you want to try this dérive, or any countermapping embodied derive using this shortcut, send me an email at ayal.bark@students.iaac.net and I will send you a step-by-step guide.