Vectorize This 3- A Question About Scalability
On to the third post in the series on the three key questions to ask when starting a greenfield project. Links to the series and the TEDx talk are available at the end of this post.
The next aspect I would like to focus on is of scale.
Quite simply — does your idea scale? If your idea were to be put on the bed of Procrustes and stretched will it survive?
The idea of scaling without breaking or pixelating is a concept familiar to designers and we will use the definition of vector as it relates to design to illustrate our framework (pun intended). In design, vector graphics are images created from a series of geometrically defined points, lines, and shapes. They do not pixelate however much you scale them.
Let me share a brilliant example.
For this, we have to travel back in time to 1833, London. The London metro has been in existence for about 70 years now and the authorities are looking for a better representation of the map of the London underground railway system.
Here is how the metro map looked before 1833.
The desperate need for a better representation led them to consider the radical design submitted by an out-of-work draughtsman by the name of Harry Beck.
What was different about Beck’s map?
For starters, It's not really a map, at least not in the traditional sense. Beck completely did away with the core aspects of traditional maps — geographical accuracy and distances are not to scale. As he said in a later interview ‘ if you are going underground, why bother about geography”.
Beck’s map was a network of straight lines — horizontal, vertical and at 45 degrees from the central London Railway line which he used as the baseline. He ignored topographical street-level detail and, instead, he placed every station at an equal distance from the rest on straight lines.
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Why did it scale
The simplest explanation is that he understood the purpose of the representation — the use of the map as a navigational aid. If you are travelling by road, then you need to know the topology, the landmarks and the distance between places. On a train, you need none of those things. Beck focused on what was important to travellers — the sequence of stations and how they related to the rest of the network.
This enabled him to remove all of the non-scalable components and thereby reduce the map to a series of lines and dots — which by the way is the definition of a vector as we saw a few minutes back.
So did Beck’s map scale the test of time? You can see that the present-day version is not that different from the original 1933 version. Nor is all that different from the version pictured in the souvenir picked up by my parents when they visited London in 1980.
Several other cities across the world have drawn inspiration from Beck’s London metro map — the latest one probably being the Bangalore Namma metro.
So what can we learn from Harry Beck’s tube map that will help us survive Procrustes’ bed?
Understand the true purpose of your project. Remove the unnecessary non-scalable parts and reduce them to the equivalent of lines, dots and shapes.
So that was dimension 2. Vector as a metaphor for scale
This is a series of 5 articles based on a TEDx talk that I gave recently.