Do you think that today’s maps present an accurate description of the world we live in? Think again. This post at Open Culture shows how difficult it is to show what the world is actually like on a flat page. That is, until a Japanese designer solved the problem last year.
“For either cultural or navigational reasons, this hugely distorted map inflates the size of Europe and North America and makes Greenland and Africa roughly the same size. A long overdue update, the Peters Projection from 1973, improved the Mercator’s accuracy, but at the cost of legibility and proportion. But last year, architect and artist Hajime Narukawa of Keio University’s Graduate School of Media and Governance in Tokyo solved these problems with his AuthaGraph World Map, at the top, which won Japan’s Good Design Grand Award, beating out “over 1000 entries.”
This video explains the problem, and the solution, in greater detail. Fascinating.
