adamantine

itwonlast:

Island map (left), coastal map (right)

At some point in his book Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design, Bill Buxton posits the following situation: “Imagine that you were kayaking along the coast of Greenland, and needed a chart to find your way. What would you use to guide you ?”  A paper  chart would prove to be impractical to unfold with mittens on and would probably end up soaked and unreadable in the process. An alternative solution would be to use an internet mapping program, however you don’t bring your laptop with you on the arctic - much less in a kayak - and while a PDA might do the trick, you probably wouldn’t have coverage where you are. And even if you did, the battery would likely have frozen anyway, or the device would be wet and wouldn’t work. If by miracle it worked and you could get a signal, you still wouldn’t be able to operate it because you can’t do it without taking your mittens off, and it’s too cold to do so. Or you would clumsily try to hold the device in your hands and it would fell into the water and sink. What then ?

Don’t forget, you are on a kayak, rocked by the sea and confronted by the elements… and it’s so cold.

The best tool, suggests Buxton, is the three-dimensional carved wooden maps used for centuries by the Inuit from the Ammassalik island. Made to be felt rather than looked at, the tactile maps can be carried inside the mittens and read by touch, a considerable advantage in a place that experiences several months of very few daylight hours each year. You literally feel your way along the coastline, “navigate at an intimate scale”. Even more, they have infinite battery life and, should they be accidentally dropped overboard, they would float.

Usually carved from driftwood, the maps often abstract the actual landmass, it’s the edges that contain all the  important informations. Rendering shorelines to people in boats or kayaks more accurately than an regular map would, the three-dimensionality is an indisputable advantage that emphasizes the peculiar Inuit mind: here the ocean is not merely what limits the land, it becomes the reference, the vantage point.

Inuits long had a tradition of relying on non-visual cues in their mapping efforts, coastal maps drafted by listening to the sound of waves lapping against the shoreline and covering linear distances of up to 1600km have shown to be as accurate as modern maps using aerial photographs, some were even more detailed. This radically different orientation system is said to be the result of Inuit living in an “aural, acoustic, non-linear bubble of space” in which there may be no clear visual differentiation between sky, land and sea.

“What you and I might see as a stick, for the Inuit can be an elegant design solution that is appropriate for their particular environment” concludes Buxton. Context is everything.