As a geographer I cringed. The article was written in a way that made it sound a bit more important than it actually is, and I think that quote was one of it. A designer finding geography and cartography for the first time. It IS good stuff though. Maybe the writing is stylised and maybe not as humble as usual techy writing?
People do think about space and the environment in spatial terms and also in time. This article is basically replaying the same failure that Google is showing - that maps only have an economic value. "Pizza in San Francisco" has been a meme in geospatial hacker land for over a decade and this is another incarnation of it. People think about space in non economic terms more than in terms of how to sell stuff via advertisements. We think about safety, attractiveness, how accessible it is, whats the parking like, who we are with, where next we are going to, what is the ambiance like, how will it be when we try to get home, crime levels, any nearby arts and events on, is the football on at the stadium, is it a weekday or a weeknight, is it near a university, is it during term time, what kind of people are nearby, are the streets well lit, how noisy are the streets. etc. etc.
Now - this doesn't discount the work. I think that a 2D map - the paper analogy onto digital form also isn't good, so any research and attempt to think about what's good and working is worth looking at. Care should be taken when giving psychological or psychogeographical points to such different designs.
I don't see the article arguing that all maps should be replaced with this visualization. It's a much better map for certain tasks. Of course you lose information by throwing out geography.
The issue is that people slide from it being a good map for some particular purpose to some blanket claim that all people really need to know is is <insert specific thing here>. The old classic case of this is geographically challenged reporters raphsodising about the London tube map https://tfl.gov.uk/maps/track/tube.
I love the London tube map, but when I lived there, it was all the more useful to me because I look at other maps so that I could know that certain stations were in easy walking distance from each other or some other place I was going to.
I disagree about the London tube map. I think it's brilliant. I barely looked at a real map any of the times I've stayed in London. I know the places I want to go, all the guide books (and locals!) tell you the nearest tube station, I know the nearest tube station to where I am. Why do I need a 'real' map?
Tube route: Queensway → Notting Hill Gate change train Notting Hill Gate → Bayswater The journey time between these two London underground stations is approximately 15 minutes
Having lived in London for a while now, I find myself preferring the tube lines overlaid on a physical map, so that you can reason better about how to get where you want to go (obviously supplemented heavily by Citymapper and Google maps).
I guess that when your abstraction is at the level of start station and end station, that is where the value of the tube map is.
I agree. I'm becoming slightly irritated by blog posts that claim something as new that appears to be either nil improvement or minor increment from what has gone before. This isn't the first or the second time I've seen it from MapBox, and I'm now sceptical of what they seem to claiming as real breakthroughs. There are thousands of researchers involved in geo worldwide - every time I dip into a journal I am humbled by the progress that is being made and the depth of the research that is being performed. Are we really to believe that MapBox are finding things that the global research community have missed? I suspect HN is a ready audience as most users do not have a formal education in geo.
Yeah. This is showy and really cool. But it seems kind of unnecessary to make it "a map"
In terms of solving real problems, I don't see it as functionally any better than a list ordered by distance with a small compass showing directionality. Basically what you see on the left when you search google maps for "pizza in san francisco".
The benefit of that list is that it uses space much more efficiently and can show things like ratings and thumbnails. Whereas in the article's ui, you have to click on every circle to see what it is.
Put another way, maps are incredibly information dense but when you remove most of the information from them, they're just dense.
What “problem” is a young single white male developer in San Francisco trying to solve?
What problems are (NOT (young, single, white, male, developer, in San Francisco)) trying to solve?
What is the Venn diagram of those problem sets? The market size? The impact?
If aiming to build a business that works outside the Silicon Valley bubble, you can go wildly wrong by designing for, appealing to, and getting traction in the tiny set.
I believe that "meme" in this context is being used within the dictionary definition of the word, meaning "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture" according to Merriam-Webster.
I'm guessing, but presumably "pizza in San Francisco" is a representative GIS problem that pushes all the right buttons and acts as a good shakedown test, and has become a "standard".
I thought it meant that Google et al are all trying to solve the "pizza in San Francisco" problem (i.e. trying to find local businesses) and not trying to solve the problems that people are actually turning to maps for, because "pizza in San Francisco" is an obviously-monetizable problem.
One thing I immediately wondered after reading the article was: do you factor "search for parking space" in the time you calculate for driving to a place?
(I live in Europe and this is a significant concern in our densely populated urban centers).
People do think about space and the environment in spatial terms and also in time. This article is basically replaying the same failure that Google is showing - that maps only have an economic value. "Pizza in San Francisco" has been a meme in geospatial hacker land for over a decade and this is another incarnation of it. People think about space in non economic terms more than in terms of how to sell stuff via advertisements. We think about safety, attractiveness, how accessible it is, whats the parking like, who we are with, where next we are going to, what is the ambiance like, how will it be when we try to get home, crime levels, any nearby arts and events on, is the football on at the stadium, is it a weekday or a weeknight, is it near a university, is it during term time, what kind of people are nearby, are the streets well lit, how noisy are the streets. etc. etc.
Now - this doesn't discount the work. I think that a 2D map - the paper analogy onto digital form also isn't good, so any research and attempt to think about what's good and working is worth looking at. Care should be taken when giving psychological or psychogeographical points to such different designs.