Gary Gale

Since I started my role at Nokia in Berlin in May of last year I've swapped the daily commute from home to work by train to a weekly commute by plane. This means I have to pass through airport security at London's Heathrow and Berlin's Tegel airports around twice a week. I tend to travel as light as I can, with a hand baggage sized suitcase so I can get off the plane and out of the airport as quickly as I possibly can, something Tegel airport excels at.

Taking the law of averages into account, I should be subject to random additional security searches and although the law of averages is generally considered a fallacy, about once a month my hand baggage gets that extra special level of attention. But it always seems to be for the same thing.

A quick review through last year's posts shows a fairly consistent theme of mine; that despite the absence of the map in many of today's location services sometimes the map is the best way of simply presenting information in a readily accessible and understandable form.

But a map is much more than just a visualisation for overlaying data upon, a map says as much about the fears, hopes, dreams and prejudices of its target audience as it does about the relationship of places on the surface of the Earth.