Get the latest tech news

Should this be a map or 500 maps?

500 priests, cartographic n00bism, and the limits of scale

Each priest implicitly reveals how they see the world around them, and the relative importance of its constituent parts: nature or people, religion or trade, architecture or landscape, precision or vibes. If I were to design a personal map of my neighborhood, it would include the potholes I swerve by on my bike rides, the neighbor’s sweet precocious 4 year old that is always on the front stoop and wants to tell me about her day, routes that have small patches of grass to the right of the sidewalk and end near a public trash can (suitable for walking my right-side-only peeing dog), the schedule and trajectory of shade during the summer, homes with potted flowers hanging off their railings, restaurants that closed ages ago, the playgrounds where we are most likely to run into parent friend crushes, and the street with the best view of the skyline at night. We have a whole host of platitudes for people in romantic relationships about give and take: “bend, but don’t break”; “compromise, but don't compromise yourself”; “meet halfway without losing your way.” But as participants in a designed world, it’s easy to forget that there is color lost when a system tries to be comprehensive rather than specific in the same way that a dish from a good local restaurant feels like a map of much more specific context than a TV dinner.

Get the Android app