/ RESEARCH PROCESS

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For my research, I started by exploring different “non-places.” I began by reflecting on and reconstructing my own behaviors, analyzing how I spend my days. During this process, I realized that I travel a lot by car, since I enjoy camping in my van. One essential part of these trips is always  refueling at a gas station—so there you go.

Because I don’t particularly like these places, mainly due to the fact that I have to spend money there, it felt like a great opportunity to turn this into a project and explore what this “non-place” is really about.

I love creating moodboards in Figma and would like to share my process with you. Have fun, and feel free to leave comments :)

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https://www.figma.com/design/BCJN7JNLrsgccfyHUMIpy8/FHP?node-id=0-1&t=ms7SJEHwYpyHwscl-1

// DATA COLLECTION

/// PHOTO/VIDEO STUDY

//// GRAPHIC/TYPOGRAHIC ACHIEVEMENT

I worked with several graphic translation methods, which I would like to explain here. Automation seemed to me to be the most important aspect:

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1. Typography:

I conducted an in-depth analysis of the invoices and searched for similar typefaces. It quickly became clear that the primary typeface used on the Aral invoices must be a monospace font. After the practical sessions and following advice from professors and fellow students, the choice ultimately fell on G2 Erika. →  https://gruppo-due.com/typefaces/erika/

For the chapter pages, a display font was also needed that behaved similarly to the “Total Amount” lettering on the invoices. During my research, I couldn’t find a suitable solution for this. Ultimately, I therefore decided—with a heavy heart—to simply stretch the font’s width by 200%. It was an effect that took some getting used to at first and pushed me far out of my comfort zone. Now, however, I really like it.

For the layout, I also drew heavily on the invoices: partly right-aligned, then left-aligned again, with large amounts of white space and many characters—essentially a direct imitation of an invoice.

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2. Infographics for presenting facts:

For the infographics, I consistently used the same line weights and colors to create a uniform look. I tried to keep the design effort to a minimum, since there were a total of 30 chapter pages.

3. Automation and technical processing of large data sets: As you can imagine, collecting data quickly results in very large volumes. In my case, there were 712 invoices. Manually processing this data would have been very time-consuming and could easily have led to inaccuracies.

That’s why I delved deeper into the topic of automation. I had all the invoices analyzed by an AI system (claude.ai) and had the data formatted accordingly. Since the AI had difficulty correctly capturing all the scans, the results were then carefully reviewed and optimized in an Excel spreadsheet per hand.

To import the data into InDesign, I used the “Data Merge” feature. With the Excel spreadsheet I created, identical, repetitive pages can be automatically generated in the desired layout. This means: You design a template with the desired fields and positions—and all 711 remaining pages are automatically filled in.

This feature makes the work much easier, and I hope that other students can save a lot of time by using this approach.

///// ESSAY

////// PRESENTATION

/////// CONCLUSION

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Collecting 712 gas station receipts was a massive undertaking. To do this, the author drove to the gas station every other day and recycled discarded receipts. This process was usually carried out after dark; otherwise, helpful accomplices were needed. Scanning and organizing the receipts chronologically proved to be a tedious, time-consuming task. A coupon is also printed with every gas receipt, which generates a significant amount of additional waste. These receipts were repurposed as material for covers of this book.

In retrospect, it can be said that processing such large amounts of data proves to be time-consuming. Here, support from AI has made the process considerably easier. Learning automation processes is urgently necessary, so that work in data driven design could be simplified with the help of scripts and automation.

The theoretical and aesthetic exploration of the “non-place” has opened up new design perspectives. A non-place brings forth entirely new perspectives and behavioral patterns in people. The author will not be dealing with such a large volume of data again anytime soon, yet it is a very good project for giving places a new perspective.

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