New way to look at the world
This week Hajime Narukawa, a Japanese architect, won a prestigious Japan most well known design award, The 2016 Good Design Award, with a map called The AuhaGraphic, that aims to create maps that represent all land masses and seas as accurately as possible.
What kept my attention is, besides the fact that no two dimensional projection will represent any geoid form with perfection, the most used map almost remains the same for since 1569, when the geographer Gerardus Mercator revealed his world map.
As Narukawa pointed out, “The AuthaGraphic world map aims to provide a new view point to perceive the world by equally showing these interests spread over the globe”. He also commented that this map would not be relevant in the past, as most of interests were on East and West relations, but with global issues like climate change, melting glaciers in Greenland and territorial sea claims, it’s time we establish a new view of the world: one that equally perceives all interests of our planet.
In my opinion, another great contribution of Narukawa’s map is to make us think about the need of new ways to look at the world, our interests and focus keep changing, but our methodologies and tools are not. It can also be perceived in other fields like government, education system, health system. So, the question is, how can we start looking at our world differently?
There is no clear answer, but what we know is that now we have more resources, knowledge, and a much better communication system, and we seem to act like innovating a hundred years ago were easier than innovate today. Thinking about this issue, I remembered the talk of Andrew Rasiej on Civic Analytics Class when he gave us the idea that we have to innovate everyday, that things have to change, and we can make it doing a little bit every day.
I totally agree with him, and keep doing what we always did make me feel that we are looking for sollutions for the future looking to the past. It can give us some insights, but it don’t look like to show us something new.
Resources:
- http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2016/10/28/hajime-narukawa-authagraph/
- https://www.g-mark.org/
