cool maps #6

this is blog post #6, my lucky number, and maybe that’s why i feel like i’ve been on a lucky streak. a handful of circumstances* have recently unfolded that make me feel especially fortunate, and when i rave about them to my friends, its met with the same response each time: it’s as if this was written just for you.

i’ve been thinking about exactly why this feels like luck. i trust that it’s my newfound clarity for what i want that has rendered these moments. i’ve felt myself so certain about what i’m looking for that when the right things cross my path, i’ve begun to recognize them instantly. the challenge now is learning not just what opportunities to hold onto, but what to let go of.

people say luck is when preparation meets opportunity—that in order to be truly lucky you have to put yourself in places where luck can find you, and that you have to step up to the opportunities luck provides.

but i haven’t always stepped up. i can count more unmet opportunities and passed up fortune in the last few years than i’d like. but this time, i want to encounter my luck with all the readiness i can muster. the next few months feel crucial, and i can’t afford to miss a beat.

*i apologize for the intentional vagueness. luck to me feels delicate, like something that shifts the moment you try to pin it down, so you’ll have to bare with me for now.

3 inspirations

• back in January, i went on a ski trip up in Vermont with a wonderful group of friends. it was the second time in my life i’ve ever been skiing despite growing up in British Columbia. it was very… eventful to say the least.

• one thing that jumped out at me, was the inspiring visuals of ski slope terrain maps. the depth, perspective, and clarity is always so striking. there was one hung up on the wall of our airbnb cabin that i forgot to snap a picture of, but i remember the first time we turned the corner towards the mountain on the snowy morning, and the view out our window was captured exactly by the vintage visual quality in the poster.

• the hand drawn beauty and effort in these maps is what gets me, this one is hand painted by James Neihues, who creates maps for ski hills all around the world.

• my map inspiration more often than not expands beyond geographic, although I tend to share the more traditional definitions here. font.fish is a great example showing spatial relationships in conceptual planes.

• inpsired by PixPlot, this tool uses 2D physical closeness to map to physical similarities through clustering processes for high dimensional data like TSNE and UMAP. i’ll admit to my limited understanding of these visualizations, and point you to sources to learn more about clustering.

• this concept of dimensionality reduction feels similar to thinking about projections and abstraction (with far more complex math).

• Life Underground is a web documentary, taking its visitors on a journey of meeting metro travelers all across the globe: gratefully shared with me by a coworker deep in the documentary filmmaking world.

• i want to highlight this beautiful workflow of zooming in and experiencing details of each traveller with full attention, and then zooming out to disperse that focus across these locations at once, as if each of these stories are happening at the same time: a storytelling method that captures and tugs at sonder so well.

• this is a beautiful example of showing how storytelling formats like film and cartography can be fused and combined to create new (and interactive) narrative tools, and reminding me i need to gather more multi-media fuel.

2 works in progress

• this is an idea i’d been toying with a few months ago: using web design to allude to urban design: creating a responsive manhattan grid with a CSS grid: a map that can only be used in a specific viewport width. unfortunately, i got stuck early: there’s no easy way to scrape map tiles for each block.

• i wanted to make more progress before i shared, and to be honest, my focus also been pulled in other directions since meeting this roadblock, which contributed to this hesitation to share.

• but if continue to hesitate, then what’s the point of sharing early work in progress? anyway. i’d love any ideas on how to progress, lol, and maybe i’ll pick this up again.

• last week, i had the pleasure of guest lecturing at uWaterloo via a creative cartography workshop and talk for the Systems Design Engineering class thanks to my old professor, Prof. Borland.

• i got to share a number of examples on personal, creative, and critical cartography, and got students to map the campus from memory, based on stories, senses, etc. i only wish i had been there in person, it was rewarding to hear when the students connected with a topic i’m so excited about.

• one thing i’ve been itching to do now that risograph printmaking has been in my arsenal of tools, is printing workshop specific atlases. i prototyped these on vellum paper so each person’s maps can be compared, with a cover of old maps of waterloo to pair with - they’ll be shipped out to campus very soon.

• i’m working on figuring out how to shorten these feedback loops: from participants sketching to taking home the final artifact. i have a few more workshops lined up in the next little while, with some very fun partners, and excited to see how it might evolve. let me know if you have another org in mind! i’d love to kickstart even more as the weather gets warmer.