How we look at our world
Opposite: Sketchbook doodles and more refined illustrations attempting to look at the world through other people’s eyes and understand how they see.
Maps, purely as a navigation tool, visually represent the world in spatial terms—how do we get from here to there? The answer lies in spatial relationships of size, orientation, adjacency and distance which utilize some of the conventional mapping tools of scales, projection, latitude & longitude and borders. However, maps as well as all of the geographic data that will populate Contextus, can be viewed in a variety of ways beyond just spatially. The organization of information or data, whether in a map or a spreadsheet, is just as important as the information itself. Essentially there are five main methods of doing so, known as the Five Hat Racks: location, alphabetical, time, category and continuum1. Coined by the designer Richard Saul Wurman, these Five Hat Racks serve to organize data spatially, sequentially, chronologically, by relatedness or by magnitude. Many common charts simultaneously employ two or more of these methods, such as sports brackets (time and magnitude) and zoological/evolution diagrams (time and category). The challenge is choosing the most appropriate tool that best illustrates the information at hand. Maps, thought of as purely spatial in nature, can become thematic, designed through interactive mediums to depict change over time, group data by similarity or sort information by importance. By doing so, it can become relevant to a wider audience. Historians, researchers, reporters and writers tend to look at the world temporally or chronologically. Politicians and economists would view it structurally while government, business and the military would undoubtedly see the world hierarchically. Artists and designers tend to look at the world in a more visual manner. Driving a car from point A to point B, I personally tend to remember the route by seeing a series of visual landmarks—left at Starbucks, right just before the park across the street from the high school. Some may think in terms of time—five minutes on this highway, two minutes on that road. Whereas others may strictly remember the way in terms of structure or hierarchy—take Interstate 95 South and get off exit 54, then turn right on State Road 47. Is there an approach to bridge these ways of thinking & seeing?
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Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at UCLA, attempts to explain in detail much of the world’s history and politics from a spatial (geographic) point of view. In his ambitious books Guns, Germs and Steel2 and Collapse3, Diamond asserts the role of physical geography and native flora and fauna to various society’s successes or failures in world history. He also makes convincing arguments by looking at the world chronologically, structurally and hierarchically and tying it all together spatially, complete with select maps telling the story of human’s evolution from nomadic huntergatherers to city-state civilizations. In his equally important book, Why Geography Matters, geographer Harm de Blij summarizes his definition of geography: Geography is a discipline of diversity, under whose ‘spatial’ umbrella we study and analyze processes, systems, behaviors, and countless other phenomena that have spatial expression. It is this tie that binds geographers, this interest in patterns, distributions, diffusions, circulations, interactions, juxtapositions—the ways in which the physical and human worlds are laid out, interconnect and interact.4
Substitute the word geography with interaction design and you still have an accurate definition. My aim is to create an educational tool to bridge these seemingly different modes of viewing the world. By doing so, the true power and extent of geography can be harnessed to provide a framework for answering the multitude of questions beginning with “why”. Why does this country have such high unemployment? Why is this region so wealthy while their neighbors are so poor? The questions may seem endless, but chances are that geography and the spatial analysis behind it can help answer them.
1. Lidwell, William, Jill Butler, and Kritina Holden. Universal Principles of Design. Gloucester, Mass.: Rockport, 2003. pp.84–85. 2. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997. 3. Diamond. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005. 4. Blij, Harm J. Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. p.8.
Contextus process book