Four Innovative Mapmakers Re-inventing the Very Idea of Maps

By training, they aren't really cartographers at all. They're architects, designers, and machine-learning specialists who are mining human behavior to build maps that are more about people than places. Like traditional cartography, the new maps combine science, technical skill, and aesthetics to display information spatially, but the information they display is radically different. And the map itself -- dynamic, thematic, changeable -- has become an instrument of discovery. That's why everybody from epidemiologists seeking to understand how an infectious disease is spreading to advertisers wanting to know where an ad will reach the most eyes is interested in their ability to reveal previously invisible patterns and relationships.

There is more and finer information available now, a planetload of accessible, aggregatable, and anonymous location data out there, much of it originating from the spread of mobile phones, GPS systems, and other wireless products with "device discovery" functionality. "We have this condition where digital technology is becoming increasingly smaller and distributed in the environment," says Carlo Ratti, director of SENSEable City Laboratory and associate professor of the practice of urban technologies at MIT. "In a certain sense, this is the first time ever we can describe a city in real time."

Geographical maps are the preferred canvas on which to visualize all these digital bread crumbs, but they are anything but static. "It's not just latitudes, longitudes, and streets, but, Who are these people hanging out in this place?" Tony Jebara, chief scientist at Sense Networks, explains. "These ideas go back. Shakespeare said, 'What is the city but the people?' And instead of saying here's the city and the street grid, you let the people define the city." There are also simply more people creating and editing maps. Online mapping tools like Google Maps have spawned endless interactive mash-ups that do everything from rate a neighborhood's walkability to calculate cab fares.

The best maps, of course, are functional and pretty. Here, a survey of some of the best work in the field right now.

There's a staggering amount of data powering this pretty map, which depicts ongoing population changes across the earth. Each spike's highest or lowest point, depending on whether a city is growing or shrinking, represents the projected difference in population between 1990 and 2015. These figures were given life by Laura Kurgan, an architect and director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University. Kurgan visualized the data by displaying longitude and latitude on the x-axis and animating the y-axis to show population for a particular year. The urban areas projected to grow the most: Beihai, China; Ghaziabad, India; and Sanaa, Yemen.

Population shifts: Cities

Detail from "Native Land: Stop, Eject," Cartier Foundation, Paris, November 21,2008, to March 30, 2009. Project team: Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan, Ben Rubin. In collaboration with Jeremy Linzee, Robert Pietrusko, Stewart Smith, Aaron Meyers. Visualization of CIESIN Gridded Population of the World, 1990-2015.

The founder and creative director of Stamen Design in San Francisco, Rodenbeck has carved out a niche as a multidisciplinary designer with a serious technological bent. Recent projects range from a dynamic hurricane-tracking map for msnbc.com to a series of live interactive maps visualizing activity on the Website digg.com. Much of his and his studio's emphasis is on creating interactive environments where users can explore data and discover patterns themselves.

ArtScope, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

An architect and civil engineer who practices in Turin, Italy, Ratti studies technology's effect on how people interact with their cities. Or in his own words, "How to marry concrete and silicon." In 2003, he established the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT, where he is an associate professor of the practice for urban technologies. His lab's current work includes a New york City trash-tracking project in which trash will be digitally tagged with "smart dust" and tracked to its final destination, revealing inefficiencies in the waste-disposal system.

Real-Time Rome

A graduate of the Media Lab at MIT, Jebara combines computer science, statistics, and graphic design to create new ways for humans and computers to interact. He is now the director of Columbia University's Machine Learning Lab, which explores how to take massive amounts of existing GPS data and reduce it to more user-friendly forms. Jebara is also the chief scientist at the technology company Sense Networks, which has developed a proprietary analytics engine called Macrosense that collects huge streams of location data in real time for its consumer application, Citysense.

Citysense