[Thanks to Jason Simmons of GradientLabs]
Suffice it to say, we live in the Age of the Mash-Up. Technologies continue to converge. Emergent technologies such as GPS and RFID are swiftly becoming embedded in just about every consumer good imaginable, from rowboats to robot dogs. As data visualization becomes increasingly more real-time, instant access to easy-to-read data maps are essential to both individuals and economies.
And, designers (being the gurus of last resort) are being asked to be much more multi-disciplined in both thought and deed. Consequently, a new breed of interface designer and digital geographer is going to be in high demand.
Else/Where: Mapping — New Cartographies of Networks and Territories as an interdisciplinary anthology on mapping from urban cartography to data visualization.
Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, editors
Deborah Littlejohn, designer
ISBN 0-9729696-2-4
$49.95
320 pages, paper
Published by the University of Minnesota Design Institute
Distributed for the Design Institute by the University of Minnesota Press
The second book to be published by the Design Institute, Else/Where is a scholarly anthology on techniques and contemporary applications of mapping, in four sections:
MAPPING NETWORKS
MAPPING CONVERSATIONS
MAPPING TERRITORIES
MAPPING MAPPING
Featuring 40 essays by U.S. and European historians, designers, cultural critics, geographers and social scientists, copiously illustrated with over 250 color images in extensive visual "gazetteers" — including specially-commissioned portfolios by artists and designers — ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING investigates:
- how new technologies of navigation and location are emerging to chart "virtual" terrain such as social networks and online conversations
- how these new mapping strategies borrow and reinvent metaphors adapted from the cartography of physical terrain, considered at various scales — urban, regional, continental, global
- how new modes of representation of spatial data are evolving to explore the potential for collective "bottom-up" (rather than "top-down") mapping
- how cities, communities and social networks are being re-envisioned, as artists and designers use technologies such as GPS, GIS and digital interface design to devise alternative mappings of social and spatial relationships.
Editor Janet Abrams
is Director of the Design Institute at the University of Minnesota.
Since November 2000, when she became the DI's first full-time director, Janet has launched numerous educational and public outreach initiatives, including an annual summer Design Camp for high school teens, the Big Urban Game, and Seven Pines Design Summit; expanded the U's undergraduate Design Minor program; developed the international DI Fellows Program; and initiated a multimedia publishing program that has yielded over a dozen titles, including books, Knowledge Maps, DVD films and TV programs.
Editor Peter Hall is Senior Editor and Fellow at the Design Institute, and co-editor of the DI's second book, ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING. He also edits the Knowledge Circuit. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Peter is a contributing writer for Metropolis magazine and has a written widely about design in its various forms, including elevators, TV graphics, bridges, neon lights and spaceships, for magazines such as Print , I.D. Magazine and the recently published books Up, Down and Across: Elevators, Escalators and Moving Sidewalks and Designed by Peter Saville . He wrote and co-edited the monographs on Tibor Kalman and Stefan Sagmeister and co-authored a book on motion graphics, Pause: 59 Minutes of Motion Graphics. He has taught a seminar class on design theory and writing at Yale University since 2000.
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