design in the age of intelligent maps

The Netlab has the first product of this summer of work over at Adobe Thinktank. Our article, "Invisible City: Design in the Age of Intelligent Maps" went live this morning. A new link is here (2014)

Many thanks to my collaborator at the Netlab, Leah Meisterlin and to David Womack at Adobe, a great editor.

As usual, your comments make all our work worthwhile!

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curating the city

It’s rare that I like a Flash site, but The Los Angeles’s Conservancy’s Curating the City impressed me. At present, the site consists of an interactive map of Wilshire Boulevard that allows you to look back at the the history of that sixteen mile long street in detail. Even though I lived on Wilshire for a decade, I learned quite a bit from the site.

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site/maps

A brief note before heading off to teach Network City.

First, even though I haven't written much on any site in the last
few days, I've been busy working on migrating my own sites to a new server and on getting the networked publics site updated to drupal 4.7.4 so that it can host our upcoming book. A lot broke in these transitions, from trouble with user privileges (ill-thought out on the part of my host) to "collation issues" (this time the trouble is with Drupal). You may notice some stray strange characters throughout this site as a result, but I'm cleaning those up little by little. My hope is that now that I've dealt with it this kind of thing won't be a problem in the future. But it reminds me how fragile Drupal is as a content management system and how, more than a decade after the web first entered my life, how far away we are from an inexpensive (or free!) application that can just manage content efficiently and effortlessly. While I can configure the site and leave it to someone, when that site requires upgrades or if it ever has to migrate servers I have to get back in the picture or the client has to find someone willing to take on the project.

Second, in an unrelated note, worldmapper is a great site, containing hundreds of projections of the world such as this one:

world population

which shows "the earnings of the richest tenth of the population living there, as a proportion of the earnings of the richest tenth living in all territories"

vs this one:

flights

which shows "the proportion of all kilometres flown around the world by aircraft that were registered there."

 

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