Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map

Nebula, web mavens, and what the Kaballah has to do with 100 years of music history.

In 1931, Harry Beck designed the first diagramatic map of the London Underground. By 1960, the Tube Map had evolved into the icon of minimalist modern design that we know and love today — a meme, even. And as any meme, it has spawned a number of creative derivatives. Today, we look at five such tube-map-inspired gems.

MILKY WAY TRANSIT AUTHORITY

A dreadfully long subway commute often can send you scrambling for ways to bend the space-time continuum. Now, one scientist has done just that — sort of. Samuel Arbesman, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow in computational sociology, has created The Milky Way Transit Authority — a brilliantly simplified map of the Milky Way displaying the complex interconnections of our galaxy in a digestible way.

Beyond the clever visualization concept, we love the fusion of science and philosophy in Arbesman approach:

People ask why I haven’t marked ‘You Are Here’ on the map – but I think it’s more humbling to realize that we aren’t the center of the universe.” ~ Samuel Arbesman

We also find it fascinating to think of the incredible and daunting vastness of the universe in such mundane terms — there’s something eerily soothing about this hop-hop-there-it-is approach to the celestial expanse.

GOING UNDERGROUND

Exactly four years ago, the ambitious folks at The Guardian’s Culture Vulture blog set out to plot the branches and connections of 100 years of music on a London-Tube-style map. From Ray Charles to Radiohead, the project is an impressive feat of musicology and cultural history.

Each line represents a different genre, with the influential musicians in it as the stops.

We strongly encourage you to explore this priceless and fascinating blueprint to 20th-century music culture — grab a high-res PDF here.

KABALLAH TREE OF LIFE

Making sense of religious doctrine can get messy and confusing. This tube-style map of the Kaballah Tree of Life, first spotted in Alan Moore’s comic book series Promethea, attempts to shed light on the Sephiroth — the ten attributes of God in the Kaballah.

Despite the seeming simplicity of the map, it plays on many of the Kaballah’s sacred numbers and relationships. The three columns, for instance, arrange the ten sepiroth according to the three pillars — the Pillar of Mildness, the Pillar of Mercy, and the Pillar of Severity. And the twenty-two lines connecting the sephiroth reflect the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.

To make things even more elaborate, adding the 10 sepiroth and 22 lines together makes 32, the number of Masonic degrees and the number of Kabbalistic paths to wisdom.

SOMERSET TOURS

We’re big believers in using something familiar as a metaphor that introduces and piques interest in something new. And the folks at the Somerset Tourism Bureau in the UK tend to agree — so they created this wonderful Heritage Touring Map based on the London Tube Map, featuring seven thoughtfully curated “lines” of tourist attractions and must-sees.

Already a clear box-breaking thinker in tourism communication, the Somerset office even has its very own Vimeo channel, including seven short films, one about each tour “line”.

WEB TREND MAP

Every year, Japanese-Swiss design studio Information Architects maps the web’s biggest influencers, subway-style. The project’s latest installment, Web Trend Map 4, is an absolute masterpiece of design, data visualization, and digital anthropology — which, in fact, has enjoyed a level of viralness deeming it worthy of being on the map itself.

Sure, WTM may be based on the Tokyo Metro Map, but that was actually built borrowing heavily from the London Tube Map, so it’s just a matter of degrees of creative separation.

We’ve just ordered a great big glossy poster of it for the Brain Pickings HQ, and we’re jabbing our pin right between TED and BoingBoing — so here’s to putting Brain Pickings on the map. Web Trend Map 5, that is.

Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Tags: art, cool, culture, data visualization, design, history
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Project Documerica

Tie-dye jeans, soda can houses, and what Thai Buddhists have to do with American cowboys.

In 1971, as the environmental movement was reaching critical mass, the Environmental Protection Agency hired a slew of freelance photographers to capture the environmental problems, EPA activities and everyday life of the 70’s. For seven years, the 81 photographers — only five of whom, by the way, were women… ahem — traveled around the country, producing what became known as Project Documerica — a fascinating and deeply insightful cultural portrait of one of the most important decades in modern history.

Thirty years later, The U.S. National Archives have digitized more than 15,000 of these photographs and made them publicly available in the Archival Research Catalog, as well as on the National Archives’ impressively excellent Flickr library.

From the booming industrialism to the ripening of hyper-consumerism to nature’s ever-more-timid cameos in daily life, the series captures the beginning of our industry-driven environmental demise — with the earnest lucidity of an era that can’t even begin to imagine what’s to come.

Subsets of the series tackle specific themes and issues — like this striking visual record of the car culture boom, which is a bit like looking at the can-tell-it-will-be-hideous-but-can’t-tell-just-how embryo of Godzilla.

Still, some of the photographs offer a welcome respite from the avalanche of consumerism — like this clever experimental wall construction, using empty soda cans to build housing in New Mexico, which reminds us of the Buddhist bottle temple in Thailand.

You can also browse the archive by state for a broad-reaching look across vastly different locations.

Despite the clumsy site navigation and appalling interface, Project Documerica is a rich and impressive record of the patterns, processes and cultural forces that shaped our current era — dig in.

Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Tags: cool, culture, history, photography, sustainability
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