This article was taken from the May 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Recognise the city? Students Benedikt Groß and Bertrand Clerc, interaction designers at the Royal College of Art in Kensington, created this map to show how they believe Londoners perceive the city -- in terms of Harry Beck's 1931 London Underground map. "We're visualising the imaginary, mental map Tube users have of London," says Groß. "For many, Beck's map is more useful than the actual geography."
They call their project Metrography. It uses 1,865,565 data points from OpenStreetMap and merges them with TfL's Tube map, which includes railway stations and the Thames.
The latitude and longitude of each point was then recalculated, keeping the positions of the Thames and stations as fixed references. Metrography wasn't designed for navigation, but Groß, 32, and Clerc, 30, believe representational guides such as this could become popular. "In future an accurate map might be less important than an abstract map," says Clerc. "And maybe we've started that process."
The duo mapped reality versus Beck using dots (check out the gallery to see their process). The black ones are Beck's -- the Victoria line is also shown -- and the red ones are the true locations.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
