US media futurist Mark Pesce kindly tipped me off to a Daily News article on a collection of visual maps known as cartograms that reveal the dynamics of globalisation forces and geo-economic imbalances. The maps on HIV prevalence and Military spending are very revealing.
The cartograms rely on information visualisation to impel the reader to reassess their assumptions about globalisation forces. Hopefully, a group of researchers and programmers could harness the power of Web 2.0 and the Asynchronous Javascript (Ajax) programming language to bring Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map and Geoscope for contemporary netizens.
Fuller's work also influenced one of my favourite books of the past few years: Massive Change (Phaidon Press, London, 2004) and its accompanying exhibition by designer Bruce Mau and the Institute Without Boundaries. Although Massive Change opens with grim images of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, plane crashes, disaster areas and technological failures, the majority of the book and its interviews with subject matter experts have a Fuller techno-utopian outlook.
Comments (2)
The maps truly are amazing aren't they? I got a link to them a couple of weeks ago and burnt hours re-wiring my brain with these inputs. Invaluable IMO. I also recently saw a basic religious history done kinda this way - of course it misses all the detail, but major blocks in time are still very telling. Looking forward to the day we have a similar Spiral Dynamics styled dynamic map - but maybe 3D representation would help there.
Fuller's maps always break my brain because they're not a globe. While I appreciate his intent etc, I just can't get past liking the whole symmetrical colored ball we call home;)
Posted by Chris Stewart | March 6, 2007 7:45 AM
Posted on March 6, 2007 07:45
On the subject of data visualisation, here is one relating to US energy use and CO2 emissions:
http://eed.llnl.gov/flow/02flow.php
Posted by Josh Floyd | March 6, 2007 8:27 PM
Posted on March 6, 2007 20:27