Towards Teleportation—Wayfinding Maps & Mapfinding Ways

Your GPS app directs you, turn-by-turn, on the quickest route from A to B. At the same time, it also defines time as the single, non-exchangeable currency for evaluating the cost of the journey. To do so, the app flattens the multi-dimensional complexities of the world into a 2-dimensional map, and then further condenses them into a 1-dimensional route, optimized for the ultimate elimination of time and space down to 0-dimensions - effectively, teleportation. The talk highlights teleportation’s depiction in an 80's horror classic, its echoes in the current rush towards automation, and its role in the untimely death of the Waze Carpool service. As an early designer of Waze maps, the speaker argues that user-centered-design has segmented us into isolated, self-driving boxes going nowhere fast. The answer, he posits, may be found in a return to mapping, not as a replacement for the territory, but as an ongoing collaborative process for sensing our paths forward and navigating our every turn-by-turn towards better futures.