Exploring The Secret Language of Maps with Carissa Carter
Carissa Carter is the Academic Director of the Stanford d.school, and a long time educator, designer, and map maker. She is the author of an exciting new book called “The Secret Language of Maps,” which reflects her passion for empowering others to learn how to read, write, and think about information and data in meaningful ways.
“The Secret Language of Maps” is part of a larger designers guide series from the d.school, which also includes “Navigating Ambiguity,” “Design for Belonging” and “Drawing on Courage.”
In a world filled with complexity, bias and misinformation, Carissa doesn’t want data to happen to you, she wants you to understand and control how you take in — and shape — the world around you. This book is not only enlightening and empowering, its tone, structure and illustrations make it fun to read. Oh, and did I mention there’s a murder mystery to solve?
As a long time admirer of Carissa’s work, I was eager to learn more about how she applied her own principles in the book — namely, principles of craft, data, and bias — to create this essential guide to maps and data literacy.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m so excited to discuss “The Secret Language of Maps” with you, Carissa. Let’s start with a couple of foundational questions. What is a map, and why do they have a “secret language”?
Carissa Carter: In this book, I define a map as anything where information or data is organized spatially and presented visually.
Maps touch so many different disciplines and domains. A map can be geographic, but it can also be infographic. It can be a framework for understanding something. It can be simple or complex.
As a designer, educator, and geoscientist, I’ve realized that maps help both with the exploration of information and data–what are you seeing, learning, experiencing, wondering, processing–and with the explanation of that information to others — what you are showing and inviting others to consider.
Maps are a source of data and digital literacy which is increasingly essential to how we all live our lives.
LKS: I really appreciate how throughout the book you emphasize that understanding how to use and read maps helps you think more deeply about the world around you. This is one of my favorite passages:
Maps are welcoming, they invite exploration. Maps don’t assume truth or at least they shouldn’t. Actually every single map in the world is a combination of the real and the imaginary. Whether you intend to or not, when you create any map, you create something that teeters on the make believe.
CC: Yeah, right. There’s a whole section of the book that really is about that thinking process, and not rushing to the “showing” too soon.
All maps consist of three elements: data, bias, and craft. Each one of those elements represents design decisions.
Let’s break it down.
Data is about the information that fuels the map. What has been selected or not selected? How is it collected? What wasn’t collected? What’s the way it’s been organized?
Bias is the agenda or point of view that the mapmaker has. The intentions that are driving some of the choices — either explicitly or implicitly.
And then there’s craft. Craft is really like: what does the thing look like? How is it packaged?
Data, bias, and craft are in constant tension with each other. You pull on one, you tug on the other.
And the creative tension at the intersection of those three things exists in every single infographic and data story map in the world.
When you understand this, you can deconstruct the data, bias, and craft in each map and better understand what you are taking in. You have to be aware of it when you are designing with data, too.
LKS: I really appreciate how you’ve turned those elements into distinct characters throughout the book through these amazing illustrations. They are so expressive — it reminds me a bit of Pixar’s amazing movie, Inside Out, where director Pete Doctor turned each emotion into a distinct character and helped us understand the important tension, interdependence, and relationship between the characters.
It also helps us understand that these elements are not inherently good or bad — they are essential ingredients that are an inevitable part of the process.
CC: Yes. Being aware of your own bias is critical, both as a viewer of any other infographic, but also as a creator.
It’s really important to remember that bias is a product of the culture and context of your current environment as well as your background and past experience. This will inevitably influence your implicit agenda. As a creator, you can make thoughtful and explicit decisions: What do I want to say with this information? What’s the story I want to tell? That agenda is your bias.
LKS: You’ve been teaching students about maps and the design of data for over seven years at the d.school. How do you help students learn these skills?
CC: The classes have evolved over the years, but I always try to make it super tangible and relevant to them.
One of my favorite activities I teach is called salad mapping. And here’s how it goes: Every student gets a salad, a premade salad that you’d get at the supermarket, so there’s a lot of ingredients in there. Every student gets one and we say, “Here’s your data set.” At first, the students are skeptical, but then they think about it a bit more and realize that the ingredients in the salad are a kind of data.
And then we have them map what’s in their salad in all these different ways, starting with basic to more advanced.
The first way is to say, “Okay, find a continuum in that salad.”
A continuum is a line with two arrows on it, and you can label each side of that continuum however you want. It can be from here to there, from then to now. Continuums are my favorite kind of maps because of their versatility and utility. Quite often continuums represent timelines, transitions, or tensions.
The continuums the students come up with for their salad maps are all different: From light green to dark green lettuce; from things to eat first and things to eat last; from ingredients that traveled from far away to ingredients that were grown locally. It goes on and on and on. There’s a physicality in the experience, too. They actually use the salad to physically make their map. So they’re laying the ingredients out on their paper and they’re labeling it, and it gives a really cool, visual effect to it.
We then move on to different base frameworks and ways to sort and organize the data. We play with metaphors, Venn diagrams, or 2 x 2’s.
Almost always students have this “aha” during that exercise when they really understand that you can map the same data set in so many different ways. And I think that is a lesson that translates to whatever type of work you do: Don’t assume you know what that data set is telling you. By intentionally unpacking the data and slicing it in different ways you can find out so many other interesting things and uncover so many other stories. Some stories are more qualitative, some are quantitative. Some are subjective and some are objective. It totally ranges, and that’s the essence of it. And that applies everywhere in life, whether it’s something unconventional like salad or a more quantitative set of numbers that have been reported in one way or another.
LKS: One of the most unusual and compelling aspects of the book is that you’ve woven in a fictional murder mystery throughout the pages, “Murder She Mapped.” What prompted you to include a murder mystery throughout the book?
CC: I really wanted to show how anything can be mapped. And I also love reading fiction, and appreciate the readability and hook of mysteries.
And including the fictional story was also a fun challenge. Can I use the lessons of mapping to unpack what’s happening in the mystery and help the reader to solve it? It was the most challenging part to write. The content about maps themselves flowed right out. Composing a fiction story was a little bit harder. And then interweaving it throughout the chapters added a layer of complexity. But I’m happy with it. If you read this book in order, the maps will help you unpack the mystery.
LKS: We’re living in a world where data and information is driving — if not defining -how we live our lives. Why do you think this book is so important right now?
CC: At its core, this book is about data literacy. It’s about how we make sense of everything we’re putting into the world. No matter who you are, whatever domain or discipline that you work in, whatever role you have, you have to process data at some level. And, you have to be able to use it yourself. You have to be able to assess what you’re looking at and make sure it’s solid work and not limp data, meaning that the data is incomplete or misleading or sloppily gathered or labeled. That’s on each of us. And it’s really important.
LKS: This book is an onomatopoeia of maps. It’s a living demonstration of mapping data, bias, and craft. It has data about what maps are and how they are used. It has bias — your belief that more people should have the power to understand data literacy to make the world better for themselves and for others. And it has craft. So I want to finish our conversation about that last part because the way this book has been designed and laid out is so unique.
CC: First,I have to credit the highly talented creative collaborators around me including Jeremy Nguyen and Michael Hirshon, the illustrators of those graphics. Jeremy, a New Yorker cartoonist among other things, was incredibly helpful for what these types of graphics should be. We spent a lot of time figuring out the personality we wanted the book to have. We went back and forth for a long time before we landed on the right visual style there.
I also have to give major credit to my d.school colleagues Scott Doorley and Charlotte Burgess Auburn for helping to really figure out how to weave the fiction pieces with the nonfiction elements to ensure they came out as a cohesive unit, and to our partners at Ten Speed Press who went along with the vision.
The craft of this book comes from having incredible creative collaborators, all of us who have strong points of view about what this should be like. To be sure, craft comes from a lot of hard work and creative tension. But I’m really excited with where we landed. And so I’m super grateful to work with incredibly smart and talented people.
LKS: You talk about maps as an invitation. I think this book is an invitation to being in more control of your life, and more deliberate about the decisions we make when we take in data, and when we present data. What are your hopes for the book?
CC: I really hope that everybody assumes that this book is for them because it doesn’t matter who you are or how old you are, we all need to get good at working with data, whether we’re consuming it, using it in our work, or telling stories with it.
