Designs for All > You Are Here: Underground Map

Before the discovering of America, the pictoric representation of the world was as a flat planet. It was a planet with dangerous limits full of mysterious creatures in the seas and with unknown areas that would scary the population. Not few lost their life for defending a modern concept of the round world. Today the representation of a round world with certain proportions and comprehensible shapes is a normal for all.

Inventions such as the cars, penicillin or electric light seem to have always been here. A similar question happens with the London Underground map. A type of representation that today seems familiar while it was absolutely innovative at the time of its creation. It is a way of spatial representation that changed the perspective to read many diagrams, maps and schemes. The idea of this map comes from the approach of the electric diagrams. A system where the use of colors and directions is enough to describe the way movements must be developed. When we travel in the tube we do not need to know, how far away one station is from another. We need how to go from one point to another one. And that is what this map helps to do, to travel in an abstract and reticular representation of the routes; it is a simple design for all.
Harry Beck was the designer of the London tube map in 1933 inspired by his knowledge of electrical systems. The map was imitated in every capital of the world. It opened the doors to abstract representations that fulfill a specific purpose, to establish a route in an ideal space.