The London Squared map

After the Flood’s visual toolkit for mapping London data

One of the early collaborative projects at Future Cities Catapult—actually roughly the same time as Pixel Track with BERG—was a small, quick, but useful, insightful and powerful bit of information design with After the Flood. (Ed. This work was subsequently developed as a book, ‘Cities Squared’)

I asked them to work with us on a visualisation ‘device’ for data about London, principally the real-time air quality data that we’re getting from our Sensing Cities project, which is a collaboration focused on low-cost sensors with Intel ICRI, Royal Parks, Enfield London Borough Council, Lend Lease and Southwark Council, amongst others.

London remains an awkward beast to map and describe information about, even spawning a book devoted to the various maps, models and visualisations about this most complex of cities. There’s also a Ken Garland book about its most famous map, Harry Beck’s for London Underground, which remains the outstanding bit of information design about London. (I can’t remember my Lanchester about whether I should call it ‘underground’ or ‘tube’ in this context.)