Tags: map

626 Sunday, April 11th, 2021

Checked in at Queen's Park. Watching the dogtectives. — with Jessica — Checked in at Queen’s Park. Watching the dogtectives. — with Jessica

map — Checked in at Queen’s Park. Watching the dogtectives. — with Jessica

Wednesday, March 31st, 2021

Design as (un)ethical illusion

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.

Seams.

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.

Saturday, February 27th, 2021

Checked in at Racehill. Out for a stroll — with Jessica

map — Checked in at Racehill. Out for a stroll — with Jessica

Friday, February 26th, 2021

map — Checked in at Queen’s Park. with Jessica

Thursday, February 18th, 2021

Checked in at Queen's Park. The pond in the park — with Jessica — Checked in at Queen’s Park. The pond in the park — with Jessica

map — Checked in at Queen’s Park. The pond in the park — with Jessica

Sunday, January 31st, 2021

Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination - Spotlight at Stanford

There are some beautiful illustrations in this online exhibition of data visualisation in the past few hundred years.

Sunday, January 17th, 2021

Checked in at Queen's Park. Parklife! — with Jessica — Checked in at Queen’s Park. Parklife! — with Jessica

map — Checked in at Queen’s Park. Parklife! — with Jessica

Eleanor Lutz - An Orbit Map of the Solar System

A lovely visualisation of asteroids in our solar system.

Saturday, November 28th, 2020

map — Checked in at Baker Street Coffee. with Jessica

Friday, November 13th, 2020

An Ocean of Books

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.

Sunday, October 18th, 2020

Checked in at Baker Street Coffee. Flat whites outdoors — with Jessica

map — Checked in at Baker Street Coffee. Flat whites outdoors — with Jessica

Monday, September 21st, 2020

Kinopio

Cennydd asked for recommendations on Twitter a little while back:

Can anyone recommend an outlining app for macOS? I’m falling out with OmniOutliner. Not Notion, please.

This was my response:

The only outlining tool that makes sense for my brain is https://kinopio.club/

It’s more like a virtual crazy wall than a virtual Dewey decimal system.

I’ve written before about how I prepare a conference talk. The first step involves a sheet of A3 paper:

I used to do this mind-mapping step by opening a text file and dumping my thoughts into it. I told myself that they were in no particular order, but because a text file reads left to right and top to bottom, they are in an order, whether I intended it or not. By using a big sheet of paper, I can genuinely get things down in a disconnected way (and later, I can literally start drawing connections).

Kinopio is like a digital version of that A3 sheet of paper. It doesn’t force any kind of hierarchy on your raw ingredients. You can clump things together, join them up, break them apart, or just dump everything down in one go. That very much suits my approach to preparing something like a talk (or a book). The act of organising all the parts into a single narrative timeline is an important challenge, but it’s one that I like to defer to later. The first task is braindumping.

When I was preparing my talk for An Event Apart Online, I used Kinopio.club to get stuff out of my head. Here’s the initial brain dump. Here are the final slides. You can kind of see the general gist of the slidedeck in the initial brain dump, but I really like that I didn’t have to put anything into a sequential outline.

In some ways, Kinopio is like an anti-outlining tool. It’s scrappy and messy—which is exactly why it works so well for the early part of the process. If I use a tool that feels too high-fidelity too early on, I get a kind of impedence mismatch between the state of the project and the polish of the artifact.

I like that Kinopio feels quite personal. Unlike Google Docs or other more polished tools, the documents you make with this aren’t really for sharing. Still, I thought I’d share my scribblings anyway.