NACIS 2016 Presentation Will Payne, UC Berkeley Episodes of standardization and divergence in the icons used by cartographers and designers over time help illuminate the broader political economy of mapping, tourism, navigation, and the contemporary geoweb. In this talk, I trace the development of the familiar "fork and knife," "cocktail glass," and "coffee cup" symbols to socialist designers in interwar Vienna who created the ISOTYPE system of pictorial statistics, through the 1960s standardization of pictograms for global travel, sports, and conventions (Buckminster Fuller hailed these symbols as a "worldian language"), up to the present day. Open-source and proprietary geoweb applications extend these conventions in different ways, reflecting the interests of developers and users: for example, sponsored corporate logos in Waze and alternate bar icons in OpenStreetMap (adding British pint glasses and German steins). Ironically, a form of visual communication intended to unite a global working class has ended up facilitating economic integration and consumption by global elites.

1. The Rise and Fall of a “Worldian
Language”: Amenity Symbols from
ISOTYPE to OpenStreetMap
NACIS 2016
Will Payne - Geography PhD Student
University of California, Berkeley

4. I: Interwar Socialist
Origins

12. ISOTYPE: 1924+

13. ISOTYPE: 1924+

15. “Few people today read Neurath's original
intentions in international picture signs. Like many
genres of modern design, the signs have been
thoroughly integrated into corporate and
bureaucratic identity programs.”
Ellen Lupton, “Reading ISOTYPE,” 1986.

16. II: Midcentury
Standardization and Style

17. Rudolf Modley: 1920s+

18. “What is needed, internationally, is a set of
glyphs which does not refer to any single
phonological system or to any specific
cultural system of images.”
Margaret Mead, 1966

19. Rudolf Modley: 1920s+

20. Fodors: 1960s+

23. “[I]t is imperative for man to be able to
communicate with any other man no matter where
he may live. This need, accented by jet travel, is felt
universally today. […] Hopefully, with this Sourcebook,
standard symbols will some day be understood by all,
regardless of language or culture.”
Henry Dreyfuss, Symbol Sourcebook, 1972

24. Henry & Doris Dreyfuss: 1972

25. Henry & Doris Dreyfuss: 1972

26. “Henry Dreyfuss [is creating] a worldian language
so powerfully generalized as to swiftly throw into
obsolescence the almost fatally lethal trends of
humanity’s age-long entrapment in specializations.”
Buckminster Fuller, Introduction to Symbol
Sourcebook, 1972

27. Henry & Doris Dreyfuss: 1972

28. III: The AIGA Legacy

29. AIGA / U.S. Dept of Transportation: 1974+

30. AIGA / U.S. Dept of Transportation: 1974+

31. AIGA / U.S. Dept of Transportation: 1974+

32. AIGA / U.S. Dept of Transportation: 1974+

33. AIGA / U.S. Dept of Transportation: 1974+

34. Google Earth: 2007+

35. “The chicken wing—or just the silhouette
chicken—has never made it to Google Maps for
a reason. These ideas just don’t speak as
well as the fork and knife.”
Patrick Hoffman, Cartographer, Google, 2011

36. Google Maps: 2011+
Bing Maps: 2010+

37. IV: Lifestyle
Segmentation and
Crowdsourcing

39. Apple Maps: 2012+

41. Airbnb: 2015+

42. Zomato (formerly Urbanspoon): 2015+

46. OpenStreetMap: 2006+

49. Thank you.