writes.casaSteep gradient ahead. Select low gear.
When I was young there seemed to be a map to where I was going. In my first years forging a design career in London I’d go to Stanfords in Covent Garden and pore over their printed and 3-D relief maps of thousands of somewheres I could go.
But from the mid 2000s, mapping began to change. Searchable, zoomable, draggable digital maps became the thing. And two decades later more than a billion questions are asked of them every month. Questions that rely upon satellites put into space on rockets built with fossil fuels that can’t go on.
Some maps haven’t changed at all. GDP is a map of financial growth, or the lack of it. A map that’s imaginary because it ignores the landscape it sits within. As our economic solid ground slips away, dataviz of ice loss maps the data we’re now swimming in. Swimming or drowning?
There are no shortage of maps to places we cannot go, and to places we’ll not want to go. And too few of where we might like to. Such are the contours of our lives.
But from the mid 2000s, mapping began to change. Searchable, zoomable, draggable digital maps became the thing. And two decades later more than a billion questions are asked of them every month. Questions that rely upon satellites put into space on rockets built with fossil fuels that can’t go on.
Some maps haven’t changed at all. GDP is a map of financial growth, or the lack of it. A map that’s imaginary because it ignores the landscape it sits within. As our economic solid ground slips away, dataviz of ice loss maps the data we’re now swimming in. Swimming or drowning?
There are no shortage of maps to places we cannot go, and to places we’ll not want to go. And too few of where we might like to. Such are the contours of our lives.
— urlyman