In 1946, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story called On Exactitude in Science that goes:
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
Borges paints an ancient world in which its cartographers, unable to satiate their crazed quest for knowledge, draw a map as large and detailed as the land itself. Obviously, this map proves to be useless, and their descendants abandon it. They must have done so on the same grounds as the farmers in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight!” Borges leaves us with a cold picture in our minds––a barren wasteland of what once was a great civilization. We follow his cryptic language in a haze. What was Borges trying to say?
The author who Borges attributed the story to, Suarez Miranda, never existed. I believe he wrote the story like a historical account because he wanted us to read the story as if it was real. Indeed, does his dystopia not sound eerily close to our current reality? We, too, live with an overabundance of information. We are constantly inundated with visually-packed, cacophonic content. Cities have gotten bigger. Populations have exploded. We deal with numbers and data in the millions and billions. Highways stretch across nations. And we’ve mapped it all––every single bit. We’ve never had this much information on our hands, and because our scientific achievements have outpaced our design adaptability, we are still learning how to organize this newly vast world in a way that does not utterly overwhelm us.
I believe we are living in a world that Borges foresaw and tried to warn us against. He was saying what the Bible meant when it wrote that Adam and Eve fell into confusion after partaking of the tree of knowledge. He was saying what the Greeks meant in their myths about Prometheus getting chained to a rock after releasing the power of fire. There is a price that comes with learning. As wayfinders designing for an information-saturated age, while we cannot slow the pace at which the world is technologically changing, it is our moral responsibility to curb the noise of the world through good design as much as possible. This leads me to Dezeen Magazine.
London based design magazine Dezeen Magazine has become my recent obsession, linked here. In their map section, I found an article on Japanese design studio Hakuten’s three dimensional ecological map of Ginza, Tokyo.
As pictured above, each cubical contains “the natural elements found throughout the district, including samples of trees, plants, insects and earth, with the intention of enhancing the local community’s knowledge of its district’s ecology.”
Take a closer look below:
This project is not the first image that comes to mind when thinking the word ‘map,’ but it is a map, and the best of its kind. It was “designed to ‘carefully express the impression of the location and history of the city, with a hidden story of Ginza.'”
But the most fascinating aspects of the installation lie below:
Hakuten made slight alterations to each plant to narrate their unique relationship to the district. On the left, there are leaves of Gingko biloba trees, which were planted in Ginza in 1906. If you look closely, each leaf has an imprint of old Ginza buildings. On the right are glothistle plants. Because they were collected under the district’s Wako clock tower, they are arranged in the shape of a clock. Through choosing to add and manipulate subtle elements, similarly to how the Berlin metro map shown in class conveys unity, Hakuten managed to tell a powerful story about the plants and district’s shared history.
Ginza usually looks and sounds like this:
The crowded district, like most of the modern world, reeks of information overload. But through delicate selection and with painstaking care, Hakuten cut through the noise and managed to tell a story of the hidden ecological magic of Ginza, creating a space in which lifelong citizens could find new, natural ways of connecting and communicating with their surroundings. They didn’t map everything. They chose to map what mattered. Borges, I imagine, would have been proud.
I really enjoy reading your blog. You are so good at writing and conveying an idea through your blog. The example in the beginning really caught my attention. A map as big as a country, it’s absurd but also made me question with you the necessity of presenting information in such detail on a map. I also really like the Ginza map you mentioned later, using natural elements as a map is such a very unique choice! They no longer serve navigation but express the impression, to tell a hidden story of Ginza. I think the whole thing is very beautiful.