Do you ever feel like you are confronted by chaos on a daily basis? I think a reasonable definition of design might be the ability to recognize structure within a seemingly chaotic situation. As designers, we must bring order to the unorganized, and create structures that can support the weight of often chaotic situations. We do that by looking at the situation from many different angles. Finding a solution requires a change in perspective. If we stand back far enough, we start to see that beneath the chaos there is structure. That’s the analogy that came to my mind when I was looking at Google Maps today.

I was amazed by Google Maps when they first released the beta version, but it’s recent addition of satellite images is even more impressive. Enter an address and click enter and you will see a regular map. Now you can hit the Satellite button in the upper right, and it will switch from a map to a satellite image. You can zoom in and out, and you can zoom in to the point where you can recognize your back yard. You can also click and drag your mouse to scroll across the map, and this is really mesmerizing. Streets, towns, farmland, and rivers become patterns, lines, and shapes. The image above on the right is Nebraska, and the image on the left is somewhere in the southwest. You may dread the thought of driving through Nebraska, but flying across it on your computer screen is a fascinating pattern of farm circles on a grid of dirt roads. It looks like a gigantic game of Othello. From this distance, you can’t help but be amazed by the structure and order that exists from this change in perspective.