Posts Tagged ‘design’
“Maps codify the miracle of existence”*…
Several years ago, I stumbled on a map so shocking to my modern workaday sensibilities that I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. “Oh, zounds, look at this old thing,” I almost certainly thought.
We live in a time when the data visualization establishment will have you know that pie charts are garbage graphics only to be employed by foolhardy amateurs. Similarly, your friendly neighborhood Carto-vigilante will put you on notice for allowing something as vile as overlapping symbols to appear on a map. Occlusion be gone! 🙅♀️️🗺🙅♂
But there was a time when people made and proudly shared maps of all kinds with relative impunity. And I believed I’d found one of them. After all, it had overlapping… pie charts! So, I took to Twitter, declared it a “forgotten map type,” and went to bed.
Years (and countless throwaway tweets) later, I stumbled on that map again (so much for being “forgotten,” eh?) and pointed out its goofy New York label. In response, Toph Tucker noted he’d searched my timeline for more “forgotten map types” and come up empty. His comment was, simply, “well this is disappointing….”
Fair.
So, I slowly amassed a more complete list…
Revel in geographer Tim Wallace‘s (@wallacetim) “Forgotten Map Types.” (And/or access them here.)
* Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet
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As we find our way, we might spare a thought for a cartographer of a different sort: Claude Elwood Shannon; he died on this date in 2001. A mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer, he is known as “the father of information theory,” of which he was the original architect. But he is also remembered for his contributions to digital circuit design theory and for his cryptanalysis work during World War II, both as a codebreaker and as a designer of secure communications systems.
“Design is the intermediary between information and understanding”*…
Pages depicting flasks of urine for diagnosing disease, from The Twenty Jordans (MS. Ashmole, 1413). The pictures run across facing pages, so that you can compare samples easily (courtesy Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)
Designing English: Graphics on the Medieval Page at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries examines the how the creation of early English books, from their hand-written language to the bindings themselves, can be viewed as pioneering graphic design. Whether a hunting manual with ages of deers described through illustrations of antler growth, or an elegant 15th-century copy of The Canterbury Tales where borders and titles guide the reader through the text, these manuscripts grappled with engaging their readers through their visual design.
“We’ve deliberately used the term ‘design’ which wasn’t used in our sense during the Middle Ages,” Dan Wakelin, professor of medieval English paleography and curator of Designing English, told Hyperallergic. “First, the term ‘design’ helps us appreciate the creativity of the past. Medieval craftspeople left us few records of their own thought processes, so we often need to use our own terms when we try to reconstruct them. The term ‘design’ brings to light aspects of the thoughtfulness and ingenuity behind medieval manuscripts and artifacts which we might otherwise miss.”…
How early English authors and scribes worked to communicate: “How Medieval Manuscript Makers Experimented with Graphic Design.”
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As we lay it out, we might recall that it was on this date in 1878 that the first telephone directory was issued. Consisting of a single piece of cardboard, it listed 50 individuals, businesses, and other offices in New Haven, Connecticut that had telephones. There were, as readers will note on the photo below, no numbers, as callers had to be connected by an operator.
“Baseball is the only thing beside the paper clip that hasn’t changed”*…
The paper clip is something of a fetish object in design circles. Its spare, machined aesthetic and its inexpensive ubiquity landed it a spot in MoMA’s 2004 show Humble Masterpieces. This was a pedestal too high for design critic Michael Bierut, who responded with an essay called “To Hell with the Simple Paper Clip.” He argued that designers praise supposedly unauthored objects like the paper clip because they’re loath to choose between giving publicity to a competitor and egotistically touting their own designs. Bierut might be right about his colleagues’ motives, but he’s wrong about the paper clip: It’s not all that simple.
Most everyday objects—like the key, or the book, or the phone—evolve over time in incremental ways, and the 20th century in particular revolutionized, streamlined, or technologized the vast majority of the things you hold in your hand over the course of an average day. But if you could step into an office in 1895—walking past horse-drawn buses and rows of wooden telephone switchboard cabinets—you might find a perfectly recognizable, shiny silver paper clip sitting on a desk. What was then a brand-new technology is now, well over a century later, likely to be in the same place, ready to perform the same tasks. Why did the paper clip find its form so quickly, and why has it stuck with us for so long?…
It was invented in the 1890s; it hasn’t been improved upon since: “The perfection of the paper clip.”
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As we find fasteners fascinating, we might spare a thought for Sir Karl Raimund Popper; he died on this date in 1994. One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Popper is best known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favor of empirical falsification: a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. (Or more simply put, whereas classical inductive approaches considered hypotheses false until proven true, Popper reversed the logic: conclusions drawn from an empirical finding are true until proven false.)
Popper was also a powerful critic of historicism in political thought, and (in books like The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism) an enemy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism (in which role he was a mentor to George Soros).
“The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.”*…
Artwork excavated from archived GeoCities pages (1994–2009).
A tribute to the lost days of unrefined self-expression on the Internet.
More at Art of Geocities.
* Thomas Szasz
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As we express ourselves we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that Bob Dylan was booed off stage at the Newport Jazz Festival during his first public performance with electric instruments (and a band that included Michael Bloomfield and Al Kooper)… The cat-calling began with his opening number, “Maggie’s Farm,” and continued through three more songs, after which Dylan left the stage. As a peace offering to Pete Seeger and other aggrieved organizers, Dylan returned later to do two acoustic numbers… but the die was cast; thereafter, his career was electrically-powered…
For a sense of just how far things have come, check out Johnny Winter’s version of “Highway 61,” taped at a 1992 tribute to Dylan (on the occasion of his 30th anniversary as a recording artist):
“The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected”*…
Change in population aged 65 and older, 2010-2023. [Screenshot: ESRI]
We’re all getting older. It’s the one thing that every single person alive right now has in common. But we’re also getting older as a population, with Americans both living longer and having fewer children. Census projections show a major demographic shift already underway and accelerating in the years to come.
At the same time, populations are not aging evenly, and issues related to aging will impact individual communities in vastly different ways, boosting economic opportunity in some areas while putting a strain on social services in others.
For instance, real estate developers that invest in progressive senior housing projects now could benefit down the road as demand for modern facilities that cater to active seniors grows. Similarly, American tech companies will see opportunity in developing innovative high-tech solutions for senior care, such as health-monitoring devices, ride-share services aimed at seniors, and care-bots. (Take a look at how Japan has embraced high-tech solutions for its aging population for more on how that might play out in the United States.)
On the flip side, social safety nets are likely to face increasing financial challenges with the continued retirement of America’s Baby Boomers, the youngest of whom will reach 67 by 2031. As that happens, rural counties—where people on average rely on Social Security as a larger portion of their overall income—may disproportionately feel the economic effects of aging.
One way to sort out who will be most impacted by aging is to look at age demographics across the country and how they will change over time…
America is aging, but not evenly: “7 maps that tell the incredible story of aging in America.”
See also this essay by Don Norman, the 83 year-old dean of user-centered design (author of The Design of Everyday Things and a former VP at Apple): “I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me.”
* Robert Frost
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As we stand up to senescence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that Peter Townsend wrote “My Generation”– inspired by the Queen Mother, who’d had his 1935 Packard hearse towed off a street in Belgravia because she was offended by the sight of it during her daily drive through the neighborhood. The song was released as a single later that year and became first a hit, then an anthem.
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