Maps and macroscopes
Written byMatt Webb. 6 comments
About Matt Webb
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Matt Webb is CEO of BERG, which has a special focus on the social life of stuff. Matt speaks on design and technology, is co-author of 'Mind Hacks – cognitive psychology for a general audience' – and if you were to sum up his design interests in one word, it would be "politeness".
Macroscopes give us a kind of superpower: an ability to feel the human scale and the grand view all at once.
Richard Feynman, the 20th century American physicist, was once challenged by an artist friend as to whether a scientist could see the beauty in a flower: “You take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.”
Feynman worked on the atomic bomb and developed the theory of quantum chromodynamics. He didn’t agree.
“I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty,” he said in an interview, telling the story of his response. “There is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. Also the processes, the fact that the colours in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting — it means that insects can see the colour. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which shows that science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower.”
A double view
This double view of a flower doesn’t fixate on its beauty. When you see two scales simultaneously — the flower in your hand; the atoms and processes of nature at a global scale — your consciousness ricochets between them, producing awe and enlightenment both.
Stewart Brand, pivotal in the creation of the earliest electronic communities and the culture of the internet, is another hero of mine. In 1966 he started a movement in San Francisco, distributing buttons with the message, “why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?’ He campaigned for Nasa to turn its cameras back on the planet and show it to us, laid out.
In the early 1970s Nasa obliged and published the Blue Marble photo. You will have seen it: the Earth hangs as a crystal sphere of white, blue and precarious brown, alone in a black cosmos.
You see yourself and the planet all at once, two perspectives overlaid. We’re hardened to such images now and it’s hard to imagine what it was like, a generation ago, to have the God’s eye view of the Blue Marble for the first time.
Brand later spoke about why he’d campaigned. “People act as if the earth is flat, when in reality it is spherical and extremely finite, and until we learn to treat it as a finite thing, we will never get civilization right.”
The macroscope
Feynman’s flower and Brand’s whole Earth are, to me, scientific instruments. Biologists have microscopes. Astronomers and peeping toms have telescopes. The instruments we have here, to use the designer John Thackera’s term, are macroscopes. Thackara gives a definition: “A macroscope is something that helps us see what the aggregation of many small actions looks like when added together.”
A macroscope will focus ideas as a microscope focuses light. A designer’s job is not only to fulfil their craft, in graphics, or furniture, or silver or whatever it may be. And it’s not only to understand all kinds of context and produce objects that are aesthetically and functionally pleasing. A designer’s job is also to invent culture.
I make that addition, to the designer job specification, prompted by my business partner Jack Schulze. In a recent interview he attacked the view that design is about solving problems: “Obviously designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention.”
Schulze points out this feature of design because otherwise design is not distinguishable from others of the many processes of creation. Great products can come out of processes such as ethnography, market analysis, opportunistic use of the cheap products of the Chinese manufacturing industry, and luck. Design is but one approach. Design’s differentiation, says Schulze — and I concur — is its obligation to participate in and invent the world. There is an obligation for designers to push culture forward, and because of that, to be relevant.
Since I’m being pedantic about the definition of design, I could easily be as pedantic about the definition of culture. Happily Bruno Munari, Italian designer and author of “Design as Art,” supplies a working definition of “culture” which is both adequate and profound. Culture, he says, is “the things that make life interesting.”
The world is changing at pace and at scale. To remain relevant, let alone interesting, is a struggle if culture is too large and too broad to apprehend. Take, for example, the global financial system, which in late 2008 almost collapsed and took civilization with it. The cleverest people in the world by any measure you can name — cannot tell a cohesive story about the near collapse of the banks. We can’t say why it happened. It is too big to see.
Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole financial system yet?
A new kind of map projection
To see the banks and, by extension, all of culture on a human scale, we need a special sort of instrument: a macroscope. A macroscope could show us the personal effect of debt and finance on a human scale, and the globalised system together. It would help us make connections and to make human connection. And from there, act.
Such an ability to feel the human scale and the grand view all at once seems like a superpower. Recently, at BERG, we attempted to visualise this superpower as it would change the way you navigated a city, the urban environment being the archetypal human creation which is lived in but also too large to comprehend.
The result is a new kind of map projection, and a map of Manhattan named “Here & There.” The projection warps the city grid, showing the top-down and street view in one. Now, looking over conventional photos of the New York skyline, I notice the absence of my new power to see here and spy there together, and being able to plot a path between them. A macroscope of the banks would have the long zoom power of Feynman’s point of view of a flower, and the visual clarity of the map of Manhattan.
I believe our job is the creation of Here & Theres for all sorts of matters of cultural importance. Macroscopes give all of us sight of our place in the world, and the power to participate in it; and, as designers, they help us understand culture more directly, in order — ultimately, and simply — to better engage in our craft with integrity and relevance.
Written byAndrew on the 9th of October
how can i access the text of this article online?
Written byGuy Leech on the 12th of October
Hey Andrew,
The full article will be available three months after the print edition is published, so early January in this case.
In the mean time, if you can’t wait, you can grab a PDF copy for only $3.99.
Written byAndrew on the 14th of October
Thanks Guy,
It’s an interesting article.
Andrew
Written bySebastian on the 15th of January
But a macroscope should still make us aware that the map/macroscope is not the territory, right?
Written byWww.robbylongley.com on the 20th of April
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Written bytimelessvideopros.com on the 21st of April
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throughout “Scroll Magazine | Maps and macroscopes by Matt
Webb”. Thanks for all of the facts.Thanks
for the post-Ute