See you there: "The Subway Map: The Last 50 Years, The Next 50 Years"

Tuesday, October 27, 2015 will mark the 111th anniversary of the opening of the New York City subway on October 27, 1904. After 111 years, the Rudin Center will join with historians and designers at The Cooper Union for a public symposium discussing the evolution of New York City's subway map. Admission is free, please RSVP here.

Participants:

  • R. Raleigh D'Adamo, whose innovative map for the Transit Authority (TA) led the TA to jettison their long-standing three-colour mapping scheme, and to adopt a scheme in which each route is colour-coded. The same concept is still used today.
  • John Tauranac, who led the 1970s committee that created the quasi-geographic subway map that has lasted (with some changes, additions and deletions) for 35 years.
  • Peter B Lloyd, historian of the subway map and author of Vignelli: Transit Maps (RIT Press, 2012).
  • Eddie Jabbour, principal of Kick Design, a branding agency. With his son Dan, he designed the KickMap transit app, which has had more than a million downloads and has been featured in several books on information design and mapping.
  • Joe Brennan, renowned for his scholarship on the subway, who has for twenty years been maintaining a subway map that has garnered much praise.
  • Sarah M. Kaufman, Assistant Director for the Technology Programming at the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation. She formerly worked at the MTA, where she led the Open Data program and created a conference and online exchange between the MTA and software developers. That program provides the foundation for the many subway map apps for mobile devices that are now on the market.
  • For more information and an event program, please click here.

    Image (c) Reka Komoli & Raleigh D'Adamo.