Need some help with the brief for Sense the City, our photography project with London Transport Museum? We're looking for pictures of 'smart, connected and on the move' London, the city that never sleeps, or stands still. One wall of the Sense and the City exhibition at the Museum is dedicated to some amazingly beautiful data visualisations capturing the ceaseless flow of movement across London - stills from three of these are shown above.
In the first, watch Oyster card touch-ins and touch-outs at tube and rail stations bloom across a 24-hour period. As the proportion of touches changes from mainly touch-ins to touch-outs, the colours of the circles changes from red to green. The circles grow and shrink as the numbers of touches change and the pattern reverses in the evening.
The second shows data from a London Taxi firm which used GPS to map the movements of taxi cabs across the city. It's stupidly beautiful to watch and gives you a sense of the relentless flow of traffic coursing through the city's arteries.
The third tracks Barclay Cycle Hire bike journeys. As bikes are checked out from a dock, the docking station’s filled circle on the animation shrinks proportionally, and once the journey ends, the corresponding docking station’s circle grows.
Visit the exhibition to see these visualisations for yourself. A great time would be next Tuesday, hand-in-hand with the evening event where design and fashion historian Emmanuelle Dirix will talk about 'Fashioning the Future'.
For the chance to see your photography on the wall of London Transport Museum join the Sense the City Flickrpool now. You have until Friday 2 December to add your images to the project.
All images provided by London Transport Museum.
