Maplab
A Data Visualizer Created a Mossy Map of Berlin's Green Spaces
Sebastian Meier used vegetation and a laser cutter to show the city’s parks and ponds.
If you wanted to know the locations of Berlin’s many parks, you could Google them. Or if you’re Sebastian Meier, you could reach over to the wall and feel them, thanks to this nifty map made from verdant vegetation.
Meier, who works at the Interaction Design Lab at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, wanted a visualization more “physical” and “haptic” than the standard computer version, he writes at Vislab. So using info from OpenStreetMap, he laser-cut a map of the city and filled in the park areas with moss scrounged from the Berlin woods. Meier spritzed it regularly with water and voila. Over a month later, he had a still-living document of Berlin’s various forested hamlets.