7 Creative Designs in Mapping
Posted on October 18th, 2010 in Design | 4 Comments »
One of my favorite characters in the past ten years is the pan-phobic, mother-smothered, practitioner of cartography Buster Bluth. Considering that he lived in the age of Google Maps, Buster’s studies of uncharted territory seemed–like most of Mitchel Hurwitz’s humor–both endearingly unique and immediately absurd.
Then I saw this piece:
A visual representation of parsed FAA data for flights
I’ll Fly Away
The above image was created by Aaron Koblin, Technology Lead of Google Creative Labs, and Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne, collaborators in Celestial Mechanics out of UCLA. Aside from the compelling aesthetic, the image struck a chord by whole-heartedly undermining my perception of cartography as a dead art.
Maybe a dead word, but resurrect it in the 21st century and you’ll realize that mapping is a crux of future understanding and innovation. Consider that the representation of data is often as important as the data itself. We’ve all seen this principle manifest itself in the dark art of statistics.
Sight Beyond Sight
Although it’s all much more complex than I presume to understand, I tend to subscribe to Fleming’s VARK model of learning and his delineation between the kinesthetic, auditory and visual elements. I know from personal experience that the visual truly does carry the weight of a thousand, thousand, thousand words.
Parsed FAA data over the course of a day. Note the clock in the lower-right corner. Planes can pulse like blood. They can crawl the sky.
Mapping is a way of navigating between dimensions and digesting spaces unseen. I am of the opinion that we are still in the infancy of the internet and the shear volume of data being mined heralds a renaissance in mapping amongst other things.
And a growing area for designers to apply their talent to visual communication. Not just in data, but ideas.
Show Me..
Here are the highlights from a mapping marathon held in memorial by Edge for Benoit Mandelbrot:
The unending search to reconcile time and space
The true size of Africa
The oldest words in our lexicon (largest font in image) change through history slowly enough that they might have been recognized by people living 15,000 years ago or more. Note the prominence of words defining social relationships.
The motion of emotions
The Internet
I included the last image for two reasons:
- I particularly like the placement of the esoteric and potentially infamous Usenet newsgroups in a dark, distant cave.
- The complexity of the Internet is rendered like a child’s drawing. Fresh and innocent.
The image focuses the core proposal of this piece: successful design is largely about joining simplicity to novelty. In practice, mapping represents an under appreciated approach to doing just that with design.
Chart some new territory.
