Design for Information

CHAPTER 4

SPATIAL STRUCTURES: MAPS

We encounter the term map, as well as the act of mapping in diverse fields of knowledge, all, however, with the shared characteristic of being “a diagram or collection of data showing the spatial distribution of something or the relative positions of its components.”1 The oldest (c. 1527), and perhaps the most frequent, use of the term map refers to representations of geographical data, ranging from the Earth’s surface to parts of it.2 Maps are used in other disciplines, such as genetics, in diagrammatic representations of the order and distance of the genes (see here), and in mathematics, as correspondences between two or more sets of elements. These are just two fields in which maps are frequently used.