And, not to hog the blog, but there seem to be good and bad lessons to take from this elegant, highly selective and somewhat arbitrary map of various green sites in Manhattan (read: below 110th Street) by Plaid. For instance, it includes both continuous spaces like the East River Waterfront park and the High Line (but not the Hudson River Park…), as well as fixed public goods like bike racks and trees planted as part of the Million Trees campaign (although not all of them, clearly). Also included is the “forthcoming” Second Avenue Subway, although the 7-train extension to the West of Port Authority is mysteriously absent. In any case, unexplained omissions, lack of interactivity and difficulties with updating or contributing notwithstanding, what seems to me especially valuable here are the icons used to represent the various sites located on the map. This is something we’ve discussed on occasion with reference to our tool, and how we might make simple graphic distinctions between the various types of data on our map. This map offers examples of some elegant solutions; perhaps we could each design/select one icon to represent our points on the map, which could then be included in the legend. This might also be a way of making our project at least slightly legible to non-English-readers.
Click map for larger, legible version.
2 Comments
1 shannon wrote:
Again, thanks, Ben. Adrian’s map critique from Wednesday night demonstrated just how important it is to find distinctive means of representing different variables or projects that might live together on a map, so as to avoid confusion on conflation. We do need to give some thought to this issue.
2 Katie McGowan wrote:
Thanks Ben! Is this the same as Open Green Maps? I was checking them out today (http://www.opengreenmap.org/) and saw they include a wide range of interactivity and now have an iPhone app. If it is similar, I do like their idea of using the interactive mapping to inform their handheld physical (paper) map. There is a tension here between the “handheld” interactivity of a physical map (between the mobile and the physical paper map) that I find interesting. What is to say that the physical map (paper) is moot when it can be auto-generated into a nice downloadable iconography via a pdf – and somehow kept relevant in time? While this presents an interesting design challenge, I think that a downloadable version of the paper map may provides a new audience accessibility that is not possible in the mobile device (or should we assume everyone has mobile? – I personally still have my 3 y.o. flip phone).
Here’s a link to Wendy Brower’s interview about Green Maps: http://archive.free103point9.org/2007/06/GiantEarAPeoplesCartography.mp3