One of the most important stories a map can communicate is safety. An accurate storm prediction or street design has a huge impact on the wellbeing of the community. And a bad plan can cause great harm, like gerrymandering or redlining, cutting off resource access to vulnerable populations.
A good map has the power to reveal these patterns
Ambiguity can make users feel uncertain. This leads to knowledge-based errors. If their mental model is different from the designers, then the design won't work the way they expect. With this dissonance, they will project their frustrations on to the designer.
Before satellite imaging, getting accurate maps was tricky. But worth the effort, if you were trying to maintain a territory. There was an allocentric view with a neutral 'floating' perspective. that is not warped to a specific view for easy accuracy scanning.
After satellites and the internet, we started framing egocentric views. With augmented reality, you could filter a map to your specific needs. The only drawback is that it is harder to see connections and patterns of the city with such focused spotlights.
Most maps now, try to be very conservative with detail. There are so many ideas to communicate in a city. They tend to focus on water/land, and clean colored lines for the metro.
For example, I'm 10 minutes out.......
This is a way to communicate with someone about your location, by abstracting your speed and location to a simple time estimate.
Being able to link time and location was a big breakthrough. This is what lead us to more precise long-distance travel and GPS.
A lot of science is measuring the change between A and B over time. This was listed in detailed tables before data visualization.
Some of the earliest graphs were sometimes called almanacs, to link the knowledge of map reading to the new application of reading numbers as stories through time.
And Artist have polished this skill off over the years. For example, comic book artist developed different transitions to play with how people perceive time on paper.
Cities change slowly, a design from 100 years ago can still affect how things are today. When cities are designed to discriminate, these effects are hard to reverse. Tactics like redlining, or tearing down black communities for interstate connections still affect the way cities get built. One of the most damaging scars from bigoted design is squandered wealth generation in a community.
Transportation is one of the most important ways to get a resource or an idea from point A to B, if that is obstructed a system can't function well. When it is hard to access essential resources like clean water, safe homes, sustainable job opportunities, nutrition food or healthcare; what will happen to the community over time? This is the price we pay for bad design.
How do you distribute resources? One way is to use lines, look at the edges and borders they create. Where is the line between mine and yours? is it a blurry line? or very defined? Moving those lines can become very territorial.
Our concepts of ownership start at a young age, we get better at justifying why things should be a certain way, but it don't mean that we get away from that raw emotional possessiveness of young children. This is why some ownership disputes need a 'neutral' mediator, usually the law or governing bodies of society.
For example, in the 1960's it was very hard to get pharmaceutical companies to invest in drugs that would only affect a small portion of the population. These drugs for rare conditions were 'orphaned', meaning that we had a drug that could improve the quality of life for a chronic condition, but no one would make it. So there was a campaign to change the ownership of drug design, as an attempt to use laws to drive behavior. The change was that if you did the research and development for a new drug you could have a patient that would monopolize your distribution in the market (for a few years). This was a benevolent attempt to get drug developers motivated to invest in small disease demographics rather than just leaving them neglected to die without hope. But now this model is abused. The strategy is to get ownership of a drug patent and never let anyone else make it. Not some of the money, ALL of it. Insulin takes about $10 to manufacture, but it is sold for hundreds. The price of not being able to pay that is unmanaged diabetes and death.
Like ripping a toy out of a child's hand. Once you feel entitled to something and your ownership has been established for a while, it is very hard to un-establish that ownership. Reversing the effects of drug monopolies will be much harder than it was to get the original bill passed.
Cats are good boundary testers. If a cat is not allowed on the table, and they get punished with a water gun, they just learn to not get caught. They will just get on the table when no one is looking, not true obedience. When they are testing these constraints, the cat might try just puting 1 foot on the table to see if they can get away with it. If yes, try 2 feet, or start nudging something on the table. Finding the absolute maximum that they can expand the boundary of their territory, how much can the cat envelop the table into 'their side of the line'.
Humans also find these lines in relationship dynamic. like boss/employee, teacher/student, or parent/child.
Zero-Sum Lane Distribution: One of the challenges of city street design is space limitation. A lane safe for pedestrians is not going to help move cars fast. Transit that can quickly move people is not going to work if it is always stuck in high congestion.
You have to chose, who is this space for?
The advice I have is to make that choice very clear. Both in the practical engineering and in the vibe that space gives off. In the examples, below the city is starting to build a model of high frequency tracks to build reliability that the community can trust.
But this city still priorities cars over human lives. There are parts of the city with 6 lanes for cars with speed limits around 30-40 MPH (about half of pedestrians die in 30ish MPH collisions, that increases to nearly 90% as the car gets to 50 MPH). A safer option would be to make the lanes more narrow and to build protected bike lanes/sidewalks. Make the design scream that this space is for humans. Make it feel not just safe, but pleasant to be out walking. This is one of those cases where UX design is bridging functionality and aesthetic.
Salt Lake City is build on a grid design. With two notable transportation hubs, the University of Utah and Temple Square. This line flow is unique in its artificial manufacturing. Human cities that are hundreds to thousands of years old tend to flow out of center cores organically like arteries out of a heart.
Because this grid design is so new in human city design history, it still has a lot to work out. One current challenge is to follow organic movement patterns on a euclidean base. For example, a major flaw in Salt Lake City is how a 15 minute car drive can take 2-4 hours on public transport. One main delay is awkward transitions between bus lines following the grid, instead of how people need to move around the city.
