satellite-connected navigational devices for route planning and as navigational aids. We have probably all used Mapquest, Yahoo! Maps, and/or Google Maps (which someone pointed out recently are not in fact maps but a map with a scroll facility). In the world of Internet interaction, maps are having a heyday. In fact, a colleague recently told me that they are, from a design-research perspective, “passé” (he actually said if he saw one more mapping application he would throw up).

I cannot deny that we have come a long way since John Ogilby, the Scotsman who called himself “His Majesty’s Cosmographer and Geographic Printer,” created the Britannia Atlas of 1675, the first British road atlas. Ogilby set the standard for maps and navigation tools that followed. He specified the use of 1760 yards for the mile, which was not then standard, and the scale of one inch to a mile. I would have had a hard time unfurling scrolls of map-page while driving down a steep road at 15 mph. But, as Peter Turchi writes in his book Maps of the Imagination: “a map may be beautiful but if it doesn’t tell us what we want to know or clearly illustrate what it means to tell us, it is merely a decoration.” In the case of my Tom Tom, the blank space seems to me to be simplicity gone wild, especially when my sweet-spot multimodal technology (“multi” being the visuals and Jane’s voice) won’t admit that it just doesn’t know what is going on or where the heck we are.

Of course, all representations, including the maps we use, necessarily leave something