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TED Talks Map designer Aris Venetikidis is fascinated by the maps we draw in our minds as we move around a city -- less like street maps, more like schematics or wiring diagrams, abstract images of relationships between places.
This video touches on numerous themes that are crucial to geographers including: 1) how our minds arrange spatial information, 2) how to best graphically represent spatial information in a useful manner for your audience and 3) how mapping a place can be the impetus for changing outdated systems.
This is the story of how a cartographer working to improve a local transportation system map, which in turn, started city projects to improve the infrastructure and public utilities in Dublin, Ireland. This cartographer argues that the best map design for a transport system needs to conform to how on cognitive mental mapping works more so than geographic accuracy (like so many subway maps do).
Tags: transportation, urban, mapping, cartography, planning, TED, video, unit 7 cities.
Marty Note
I heard an art critic say, speaking of Andy Warhol, that in the end there was always black. Once heard this secret could never be forgotten. All Warhols looked different once the black that was always there was pointed out. Knowing that one hidden secret, albeit hidden in plain sight, makes your experience of Warhol shift 180 degrees.
Maps are the heart of much of Internet marketing now. Once time and place no longer matter very much the sole remaining temporal dimension - PLACE - becomes doubly important. Where you are tells so much about what you want. Add enough information about your wheres (where were you, where are you going), trned your "wheres" over time, discover your your burst-y trends, and you rub Aladdin's lamp to receive 3 Internet marketing wishes.
In Plato's famous cave people stumbled around believing shadows were truth. Shadows appear true only when you don't know where you are. In our commoditized world where so much is bough and sold the last remaining impossible to fake truth is place. I can be a woman playing a man playing a woman easily online, but the flash up to the satellite can't be fooled.
Place, modeled correctly, forms the truth of a person. On Tuesdays you are statistically most likely to be HERE and HERE implies you are doing this. Read Barabasi's Bursts to learn a sad truth. We are not as unique or wild and crazy as we think, not by half. We are patterned and habit forming.
Combine Barabasi's Bursts with a GPS chip to come out of Plato's cave and know the truth of me, you and a boy named Sue :).
Via YK Chau
