''I like the idea of data as a raw material.''
Justin Palmer's gorgeous 'data maps' have rightly caught the eye of the design community in recent months. We ask him how he turned a relatively sedate subject - the age of the buildings in the neighbourhoods around Portland - into a prismatic array of futuristic hieroglyphs.
To fully enjoy them as wonderful abstract pieces of art, we've taken our favourite bits of the map and zoomed in. If you want to know more, see the link at the bottom of this page.
Below: Beaverton, Oregon
Below: Close-up of Ladd's Addition, southeast Portland
FUTURE-ROCKER: Justin,
These maps are really stunning, and fascinate on so many levels. How did you do
them?
The map was possible through open source tools and open
access to public data. The city of
Portland maintains and releases a bunch of public data, and the building
dataset is one of those releases. The dataset contains a record of over 600k
buildings and many of them list the year they were created.
After acquiring the data, I imported it into the open source
map editor, TileMill. This is where I
worked on the visuals of the map, tweaking the color ranges via Carto, adding
rivers and parks, etc. After I was
comfortable with everything, I exported the resulting tiles to MapBox and then
used GitHub Pages to host the website.
It's kind of fascinating to think that none of this would've
been possible five years ago. The tools
didn't exist, and the data was locked away on some hard drive.
FR: What does 'data' mean to you? To many people,
it represents something scary and Orwellian, whereas you show that it can be
have an inherent aesthetic quality.
Data forms the basis of art and information. I think cartography is an especially
compelling use of data, because it's easy for individuals to identify
with. People see themselves, their
lives, on a map; places they've been, places they want to go, places they feel
safe and places they fear.
I like the idea of data as a raw material. Like most raw material, it's up to the
craftsman to decide if they want to use it responsibly. Data will always exist, and unlike other raw
material, it's only going to become more abundant with time.
FR: Have you had any offers to 'do' other cities?
Or would you like to?
I've been informally asked to do other cities, but I doubt I
will. Portland is my home and it's the
place I identify with the most. However,
I've seen other maps pop up for the Netherlands, NYC, Chicago and London among
others.
FR: What originally got you started?
I guess you could say I started out doing design for
software. Not long after, I started
programming in a bunch of different programming languages. Along the way, data visualization became a great
way for me to merge the two skill sets.
I've been influenced by a number of sources. I really love the way the NYTimes uses data
to help tell a story. I'm also a big fan
of Eric Fisher's work.
Below: North Portland, with the Willamette River on the left
Below: Showing neighbourhoods between Beaverton ( in the north ) and Tigard ( south )
Below: Portland, showing the Willamette River ( grey ), and the Banfield Expressway ( black line curving across the centre ).
Below: Expanse of neighbourhoods, with the Banfield Expressway ( across the top of map )
Below: Map of Portland
Below: Sabin / Irvington neighbourhood, northeast Portland
Our look at the urban environment continues back here in a few months, and also in our sister mag, MONOBLOG.
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