Misconceptions
Some common geographic mental misplacements.
Some common geographic mental misplacements.
A free PDF with five articles:
Three of those authors spoke at this year’s UX London!
Good news and bad news…
The good news is that web notifications are coming to iOS—my number one wish!
The bad news is that it won’t happen until next year sometime.
City of Women encourages Londoners to take a second glance at places we might once have taken for granted by reimagining the iconic Underground map.
I love everything about this …except that there’s no Rosalind Franklin station.
Many, if not all, of our world’s most wicked problems are rooted in the excessive hiding of complexity behind illusions of simplicity—the relentless shielding of messy details in favor of easy-to-use interfaces.
But there’s always a tradeoff between complexity, truth, and control. The more details are hidden, the harder it is to understand how the system actually works. (And the harder it is to control). The map becomes less and less representative of the territory. We often trade completeness and control for simplicity. We’d rather have a map that’s easy to navigate than a map that shows us every single detail about the territory. We’d rather have a simple user interface than an infinitely flexible one that exposes a bunch of switches and settings. We don’t want to have to think too hard. We just want to get where we’re going.
Seamful and seamless design are reframed here as ethical and deceptive design:
Ethical design is like a glove. It obscures the underlying structure (i.e. your hand) but preserves some truth about its shape and how it works. Deceptive design is like a mitten. It obscures the underlying structure and also hides a lot about its shape and how it works.
There are some beautiful illustrations in this online exhibition of data visualisation in the past few hundred years.
A lovely visualisation of asteroids in our solar system.
What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.
This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.
A timeline of city maps, from 1524 to 1930.
Robin Hawkes has made a lovely website to go with his newsletter all about maps and spatial goodies.
Well, this is a rather wonderful mashup made with data from thesession.org:
The distribution of Irish traditional tunes which reference place names in Ireland
80 geocoding service plans to choose from.
I’m going to squirrel this one away for later—I’ve had to switch geocoding providers in the past, so I have a feeling that this could come in handy.
Tom’s videos are so good! Did you see his excellent in-depth piece on copyright?
This one is all about APIs and the golden age of Web 2.0 when we were free to create mashups.
It pairs nicely with a piece by another Tom from a couple of years back on the joy of Twitterbots.
The beautiful 19th century data visualisations of Emma Willard unfold in this immersive piece by Susan Schulten.
An absolutely gorgeous piece of hypermedia!
Data visualisations and interactive widgets enliven this maze of mathematics. Dig deep—you may just uncover the secret passages that join these concepts together.
I can’t decide if this is industrial sabotage or political protest. Either way, I like it.
99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic
A lovely little bit of urban cartography.
I’m finding this tool to be very useful for the kind of chaotic mind-mapping I do when I’m preparing a conference talk.
The design history of the New York subway map.
A look at all the factors that went into choosing the Apollo landing sites, including this gem:
Famous amateur astronomer, Sir Patrick Moore, also produced a hand drawn map of the moon from his own observations using his homemade telescope at his home in Selsey, Sussex. These detailed pen and ink maps of the Moon’s surface were used by NASA as part of their preparations for the moon landing.