Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Brian Romer

I love this map. I found it in a hospital in Baltimore, and on first glance naturally looked over the part where I live (New England) and found a dense saturation of pins. Each pin represents where one of the patients who came to Baltimore was from. The entire East Coast is well represented, and every state in the US has at least one pin. In fact it’s a full world map with pins on all continents except Antarctica.

It was only the following day that I noticed the new, angular southwestern coastline from Texas to California pushing out into the Pacific. Looking closer, this border includes parts of northern Mexico. When I tried to find the rest of Mexico, it hit me that the Continental US here was cut from a larger map and glued on top of the world map.

trading accuracy for emotional truth

This map was put on the wall for the pins. Each family that visits that hospital goes through an emotional and stressful experience; the hospital offered the pins as a form of representation: I was here, I’m from there. Collectively, anonymously and over years, patients and their families gradually built up a symbolic picture of the larger community they’re a part of — likely without ever meeting more than a few others in that community.

At some point the world map didn’t offer any more physical space for Americans from the East Coast to participate — the regions people looked to were completely covered with the pins from other visitors. The service the staff had offered the patients, the action of representation and emotionally connecting I’m from there to the collective community, was closed off.

So they fixed the map by breaking it. What they needed was more room for pins, so they zoomed in, old school, on the US with scissors and glue. This must have created space for dozens more patients to participate. Of course it was done sloppily, at the expense of all of southern Canada and most of Mexico. And now the East Coast is once again too full to place any more pins. But the map was broken for a purpose: to give more people the experience of connection.

Are there more elegant solutions to this problem? Definitely — an easy one would be to just put up a second, larger map of just the US next to the full world map, for Americans to place pins in.

all maps are broken

This is an extreme example of mapbreaking, but the flat geographic maps we’re used to looking at, and locating ourselves on, are all incorrect. It’s easy to forget that 2D maps of the world pull one fundamental trick: flattening a sphere. These flattenings are called projections, and every projection has its tradeoffs.

The projection we see most commonly is the Mercator Projection. If you’re navigating a ship with a compass and sextant and need to to accurately track lines of latitude, nothing beats it. The cost of any projection is distortion; it’s just a question of where. The Mercator keeps lines of latitude consistently perpendicular to lines of longitude, but it expands the poles and shrinks equatorial regions. Many of us grew up knowing that Greenland is about the size of Africa, or maybe a little bigger. Right?

image from Wikipedia

The following few projections appear more balanced across the globe, but none of them can get it completely right. Cartographers often position the map so the distortion happens more at the poles, and the ‘cut’ goes across the Pacific.

images from Mike Bostock

By looking at Zan Armstrong’s interactive comparative map we can much more accurately examine the sizes of countries and continents. Greenland, for example, is dwarfed by Africa when the same projection is applied to each and the two projections are overlaid:

image from Zan Armstrong

Kai Krause in his project The True Size of Africa did the graphical and the math exercises to show that several continents and countries can more or less fit within the continent of Africa:

image from Kai Krause

We internalize notions of North and South “up” and “down” with map conventions — which is strange for an orb floating in space. Any orientation should work equally well, as should any centerpoint.

image from flourish.org

A physical globe is our best way to understand the actual shape of the Earth.

image from Wikipedia

When we render a 3D globe in 2D, it’s called an Orthographic projection. The tradeoffs here are that we have a smaller area of the world map within any one view, and the edge shapes are distorted.

image from Mike Bostock

prior art: trading accuracy for statistical truth

When trying to visualize measurements like population or vote counts on a geographic map, there’s a consistently vexing problem with distortion. Smaller, more densely populated regions (like New Jersey) show up a fraction of the size of large, sparse regions (like Wyoming) because, well, larger regions are bigger. But when we encode values on this map with color, the larger geography commands our view and gives us the impression of “much more stuff” in Wyoming, despite the evidence.

image from electoralmap.net

Cartograms provide a way to address this. Geographies can either be proportionally distorted to reflect the actual values they encode:

image from Wikipedia

…or they can be standardized to be equal area and shape, in a stylized approximation of the correct geographic position — and they don’t have to be squares.

images from NPR

This cartogram preserves the geographic shapes of US states but resizes them to encode the relative voting power residents of each state have, truly breaking the map:

image from New York Times

Jim Vallandingham’s Visualizing the Racial Divide project artistically rethinks how we can understand the racial makeup of Census tracts in cities. In his maps, neighboring tracts with significant racial differences push away from each other, revealing where the biggest differences are.

image from Jim Vallandingham

alternative navigation

Without compasses, Pacific Islanders crafted these stick maps to represent ocean swells, currents and relative locations of islands. These were effective navigation tools which were created as memory aids but not brought on voyages. To learn more, see Polynesian Stick Charts

image from Wikipedia

The Inuit of Eastern Greenland devised tactile maps from driftwood to navigate the complex coastline:

image from DecolonialAtlas

trading convention for legibility

The London Tubemap is a world-famous design solution to the problem of Londoners navigating public transport. In an accurate map of London, the tube lines bundle together and overlay each other, and are hard to pick apart visually.

image from Londonist

In 1931 Harry Beck took the approach of abstracting the tube lines into a more circuit-like, functional connectivity, at the cost of geographic accuracy.

image from WaybackMachine

The tube map, now much more complex than the original, is viewed and used daily by millions.

image from Transport For London

By thinking beyond strict geography Beck created a beautiful, usable and memorable tool.

This map from Alessandro Zotta and Density Design Lab depicting the flow of ISIS fighters recently won gold at the 2017 Information Is Beautiful Awards:

images from Alessandro Zotta

The diamonds and flow lines capture our attention, and the overall balance of the design is masterful. Countries seem to be in some kind of geographical order — but on inspection are ordered simply by distance from Syria in any direction. The size of the diamonds encodes the Muslim population per country. Countries are stacked vertically in order of total population size. Because some countries’ populations are orders of magnitude larger than others, the scale is nonlinear and customized to match the layout of the diamonds and flow lines. The flow lines split, rejoin and sometimes circulate back to their origins. Because of its novelty it’s not an automatically easy map to read. But there are clear instructions and the image demands the reader’s attention, and rewards repeat viewing.

the beautiful crutch

Geographic maps are easy to love. They’re aesthetically pleasing and emotionally resonant. Maps remind us of where in the world we’re from and all the places we’ve been. Every place we’ve been is layered with memory and experience, and geographic maps have a way of pulling on those strings.

But maps can also be a kind of cheap shortcut to attention. We know people will look more closely at a visualization that includes a map. And if some of the data is geographic, why shouldn’t we show it on a map?

Those of us in the data visualization field should challenge ourselves and each other to create representations that are beautiful, accurate, and novel — and which don’t necessarily lean on geographic maps.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href">https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href</a>

Mapbreaking was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mapbreaking

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