The History of Thinking in Maps

Mark O'Mara: Today's topic is an article you wrote on the Nest Labs website called Thinking in Maps. It started as an article where I just wanted to review all of the different ways you could think in maps but by doing research I realized that human beings have started thinking in maps way earlier than what I realized thousands of years ago and I thought that was fascinating. He says he always loves the historical example because those of us who work in digital tools tend to very box it into exactly how devices or the tools that we have today work. But going back and looking at these older very different cultural contexts, very different even writing implements and things like that can be very enlightening.