Tehran metro's environmental graphics and its impacts on culture and identity

The main tasks of ‘Environmental Graphics’ have been designated as: Provision of instructions and essential information, environmental embellishment, ease of interconnection and visual identity establishment all of which can affect the culture and identity of the audience through an unconscious process. If we consider, on the one hand, the crisis of identity and cultural problems of the present era and on the other hand the tumult, chaos and the confusion associated with urban spaces as the most critical issues of urban communities’ conventions, then we should recognize the nonverbal, bilateral and tight interrelation between environment and culture as two elements which fulfill human’s material and spiritual needs.. In modern communities, environmental elements and phenomena have become a safe haven for human communications. As one of the urban transportation systems, metro, as well as the most useful and modern of all such systems, also brings about undoubtedly the contingencies of modernity, putting its other essential and cultural functions in the shade. The present study is an attempt to investigate the cultural and identity-oriented effects of Tehran metro’s environmental graphics from a rigorous and specialized perspective and further identify the factors contributing to the environmental elements design of this urban scenery, exploitation of cultural and identity-oriented values and conduct needs-basement on the above mentioned factors. The methodology of this study is descriptive and analytical and data has been collected through library and survey research by means of the stationary frame of reference. The results gained from most of the Metro stations in Tehran indicate that in designing the elements of environmental graphics of the stations, variables such as passengers’ characteristics, local texture, exclusive properties of each station and religious and national conventions of our country have been neglected to the extent that in the design of most Metro stations’ environmental elements, a single uniform system of ideas has been employed.