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My god, it's full of contour lines!
Jul. 6th, 2007 10:13 pmIt is a well-known fact that I am a cartophile. I love maps. I have three posters on my walls right now, and they are all maps of Africa, for instance. (And they all show different spatial aspects of the continent! I think that is so incredibly cool.)
Maps are the place where art and science meet; a map is a visual representation of data, displayed in a way which is aesthetically functional. There are guidelines to the art - one can fill up a whole semester with cartographic conventions, if not a few degrees' worth of time! - but it's still mostly up to the cartographer.
Maps are awesome.
It is perhaps a less-well-known fact that I am also an IKEAphile. By which I mean Swedish furniture. I love the simple clean lines of it and the quirkyness. I also like that one can fold it up and take it anywhere. Yay for modular design.
My mother saves me the IKEA catalogues every year. I love to sit with them and plan my "Hypothetical House" - that is, the house I will have one day, which I'll be able to really turn into MY house.
Today, someone in one of my communities posted a link to a website in which someone has combined the two. It's so beautiful. There's even a pun in the name. Topoware, they call it, and it's made of win.
"Topoware is a tableware collection that questions the landscape of dining. Taking inspiration from the recent popularity of geography as a media of communication (with Google maps) and more specifically with topographic maps, which define heights of a landscape two dimensionally, Topoware in turn, "outlines" the dining experience."
http://www.topoware.org
How totally cool is that? I hope it does well enough so that when my House is no longer Hypothetical, I can do my whole kitchen over in the stuff.
Maps are the place where art and science meet; a map is a visual representation of data, displayed in a way which is aesthetically functional. There are guidelines to the art - one can fill up a whole semester with cartographic conventions, if not a few degrees' worth of time! - but it's still mostly up to the cartographer.
Maps are awesome.
It is perhaps a less-well-known fact that I am also an IKEAphile. By which I mean Swedish furniture. I love the simple clean lines of it and the quirkyness. I also like that one can fold it up and take it anywhere. Yay for modular design.
My mother saves me the IKEA catalogues every year. I love to sit with them and plan my "Hypothetical House" - that is, the house I will have one day, which I'll be able to really turn into MY house.
Today, someone in one of my communities posted a link to a website in which someone has combined the two. It's so beautiful. There's even a pun in the name. Topoware, they call it, and it's made of win.
"Topoware is a tableware collection that questions the landscape of dining. Taking inspiration from the recent popularity of geography as a media of communication (with Google maps) and more specifically with topographic maps, which define heights of a landscape two dimensionally, Topoware in turn, "outlines" the dining experience."
http://www.topoware.org
How totally cool is that? I hope it does well enough so that when my House is no longer Hypothetical, I can do my whole kitchen over in the stuff.
