Day Trips show Maps as Art and Interface

Bugaboo, a Dutch stroller company, recently added a complimentary site focused on ‘Day Trips’. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, a day trip is a little trip you take during the day. For couples, this often takes the form of a date. For Bugaboo, presumably, it is a little more of a family affair. On visiting the site you are greeted by a world map lit up with dots representing possible day trip locations. This isn’t quite the world geographic map you might be familiar with - it is made up of squarish blobs that create a world without national borders, geographic features or traditional labels. Bugaboo has taken the approach here that, due in part to the limited number of cities available, you probably know where to click - even with such a stylized display. I found it remarkable easy to figure out where places are.

[Editor's note - From my past experience you usually take day trips where you live. This is one of the few locations that people are pretty good at picking out on a map and Bugaboo both addresses the practical issue while at the same time making the feel of browsing other worldly day trips more fanciful.]

When you click on any of the locations you get a close up with all the available trips in that one city (Only Los Angeles and New York City have multiple trips). Once you chose the trip you want, you get a artist’s map drawing of the city with the path of your day trip step by step, including the details and activities for each stop. On the same page, you can view other users’ opinions about the trip, send the trip to a friend, download the trip, or view the info on the artist who created the map. Oh, and make no mistake these are artists. Apparently each day trip map is a particular artist’s interpretation of the city and trip. There is an incredible amount of diversity between presentations, not only artistically but with regard to perspective, colors selection and visual language. Compare two perspectives for NYC below (China town on the left, the Upper east side on the right).

While an interesting highlight for the fine art of crafting a day trip, the geographic representations on the site on the compelling features. Not only does Bugaboo treat maps as art, commissioning different unique (but functional) portrayels of the city, they’ve also shown remarkable insight in not doing the same for their world map. The world map here is not ‘a picture of the earth’ - it’s just a selection tool, and a pretty good one.