I love maps - love reading them, analyzing them, staring at them - anything. I can spend tons of time doing this. When Google Earth came out I played with it for hours - [ahem] not on company time, of course - and when Google Maps interfaces started coming out, I wanted one. Alas, I had not the technical skill to create a mash-up with the Google Maps API. What was a cartographically-inclined-but-technically-challenged guy like me to do?

Imagine my pleasure when I stumbled one night onto the "My Maps" feature on the main Google Maps page. It sits at the top of the left side-bar, next to Get Directions. Select it and you can browse a number of other people's maps (many useful, or, at least, interesting) or create your own. You get the standard Google Map as a canvas and can then plot push-pins (or a number of other symbols), lines, or areas on the map, giving each its own color along with the standard fly-out description box in which you can embed formatted text, links, and images. You can even see the results in Google Earth. It is all a matter of clicking and dragging. Really cool.

Below is the map I made - Traditional Small Boats of the World - as a spin-off of my personal blog, Chine bLog, my commentary on small wooden, traditional, and tradition-inspired boats. I wanted to show notable traditional boats plotted in their native waters, so people can compare designs across geography. Select one of the push-pins to see the boat and links to deeper information about it. To the best of my knowledge, no other resource like this exists anywhere and I created it in the span of a few evenings.

Use your imagination with the concept. Would it be valuable to plot projects, chapters, regions, or other programmatic features on a map and let users access that content in this manner? This is yours for the taking, all for the price of your time. Enjoy!


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Scott Berkun at The Berkun Blog recently posted the results of an informal study he did on why designers fail. While he doesn't say it anywhere that I could find, he seems to mean "designers" in the narrow sense of "graphic designers." I think the conclusions probably map reasonably well to any sort of designer, i.e., technical architects, information architects, etc. The survey went as follows:

The survey consisted of 41 issues, divided into three categories: Psychological, Skill and Organizational. Each participant ranked each issue on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 meaning the issue was highly significant in explaining why designers fail, and 1 meaning least significant (3 was identified as a neutral value).

There aren't any clear AH-HA!s in the results, but a couple things stood out to me:

• Know what you don't know - Not surprisingly, the two top reasons were "people in non-design roles making design decisions" (4.18 mean) and "managers making design decisions w/o design training" (4.14 mean). These were the only two to pass the 4.00 barrier. This point was drilled in to me a while ago at a Pragmatic Marketing seminar. You not only have to let people play their roles, but you also have to stop yourself from trying to do so as well. The instructors actual example was that 'a housewife with flair does not an interior decorator make.' I am really sorry to say I took this seminar well after 1956, but try to see the point.
  
• Let the design process happen - I am now picking and choosing a bit - many of the top reasons are about designers themselves - but another set of the top reasons related to management not giving designers space to do what they do. Items here were: "no time is provided for long term thinking" (#4, 3.81 mean), "only lip-service is paid to 'User centered design'" (#7, 3.64 mean), and "it’s never made safe to fail or experiment" (#8, 3.62 mean). I wonder if the last is understated due to people not realizing this is going on... The point is that designers need the time and space to plan a long-last approach, focus on users, and play with possibilities. Cramming them into a narrow approach is asking for trouble.
  
• You can't pin it all on organization - If I'd had to wager, I would have thought for sure that the organizational elements were the big drivers. This wasn't the case. Organizational issues had a mean score of 3.37, but this was not significantly higher than skill issues (3.15 mean) and psychological issues (3.11 mean). Again, I am curious to know if the organizational aspects are understated because respondents can't, due to human nature, recognize the full extent of some of these aspects.
  

As I said, there is good feedback in the report for designers as well. Thanks to Scott for these interesting nugget of research. It is pretty cool what you can do with gumption, an email list, and SurveyMonkey.