Die Zeit-Karte

As he briefly mentioned in the last post, Tom himself has been creating some Processing sketches over the festive period. Tom's work is dominated by the theme of travel. His blog contains a tube map planner with a difference: when you pick a station the map morphs to show how temporally close other stations are.

The idea of that personal space is not uniformly distributed is not a new phenomenon: in 1976, Kevin Lynch's famous Image of the City proposed that the map we draw around us is distorted in favour of the area we know. Thus "close" areas are more prominent than those far away. "Close", though, has its own interpretation: geographers talk of "isochrones": contours that represent equal travel times to a particular destination.



In a world where we take various forms of transport, the isochrones can take on complex patterns. Just as we can map isochrones, we can also distort the map so isochrones are evenly distributed, to create a Lynch-like map for the current location.



Tom's tube map sketch is here:
http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/p5/tube_map_travel_times/applet/

German speakers might like to read Der Spiegel's article about it here:
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzkultur/0,1518,393787,00.html

See also Roxana Torre's Personal World Map:
http://www.personalworldmap.org/