Today we launched CaliParks.org for the state’s Parks Forward Commission. CaliParks.org is the first statewide parks search engine that brings together expert-level park boundary and management data with social media content from Instagram, Flickr, Twitter, and Foursquare. Our mission was to create a statewide search engine for parks that would show you information about parks...
Ready to make lovely maps using open source data on an open source platform? Two new basemap styles — Positron and Dark Matter — are available from mapping platform CartoDB, waiting for you to make your own beautiful visualizations. CartoDB already has a suite of styles to choose from, but some of the ones using OpenStreetMap data were only...
This week, the California Healthcare Foundation (CHCF), a longtime Stamen client, released a completely redesigned and updated version of All Over the Map, a tool to help policymakers, health professionals, and concerned citizens discover variations in the prevalence of elective procedures across California. Why does such variation matter? Well, it turns out geography matters when...
Few things are more vital to a city than safe, accessible fresh water. More than 20% of the world’s population lives in areas where access to clean, fresh water is challenging. It’s obvious: Healthy cities need reliable clean water to thrive. But how do we achieve that critical goal of safe, secure water supplies for...
It’s no secret that the field of cartography has been going through some pretty serious change lately, and that a lot of this change is happening because of work being done here in the Bay Area. San Francisco-based nonprofit think tank SPUR has been tracking developments in the field and doing a lot to get...
Greetings from Berlin. Earlier this week I was in Turkey, where I’d spent the last week coordinating the install of our curation, Mapmaker Manifesto. The second Istanbul Design Biennial opened to the public on November 1. Produced by iKSV, one of Istanbul’s, if not Turkey’s, largest arts foundations, the event worked with over 50 artists,...
This year, the Istanbul Design Biennial has chosen the theme The Future is Not What it Used To Be. When they opened the call for participation back in January, they asked for manifestos of any form — words, videos, artworks, anything that spoke to this theme. So theMapmaker Manifesto was born. This manifesto demands that we look...
This summer, I’m working on a Creative Code Fellowship with Stamen Design, Gray Area and Autodesk. The project is called Water Works, which will map and data-visualize the San Francisco water infrastructure using 3D-printing and the web. Finding water data is harder than I thought. Like detective Gittes in the movie Chinatown, I’m poking my...
Outside our own kitchens, gas leaks aren’t something we’d ever thought much about here at Stamen. But being a studio filled with progressive San Francisco do-gooders and all, we do think about climate change and sustainability. We also think an inordinate amount about all the sensors out in the world gathering data — satellites, airplanes, cellphones, Jawbones,...