A clever chap, Harry Beck. He came up with a different way of representing the London Underground on a map that was less about reality and more about convenience. He gave us the "traditional" tube map as we know it.
Is it Art? I don't pretend to know, but it's certainly a clever design.
Simon Patterson took Mr Beck's idea and made his own version of it, "The Great Bear", as "art"... clever, off-beat, and one of the 50 original prints did sell at auction for £14,950, and it did hang in the Tate Gallery for a while. But you couldn't usefully navigate London with it.
And at some point someone had a go at creating this gem, titled the "If England had lost the war" tube map. The translation looks a bit dodgy, and there's clearly an element of irreverent humour at play... but you could actually navigate with it.
Which sort of brings me to my question...If I create a taxonomy, a sort of artifical construction, a classification, that I believe will help people to find stuff that I have organised in some way, does it have to be "right"? Is it sufficient for it to be a "convenient" simplification ?
If it's arrived at by some sort of consensus, and sort of works empirically, warts and all, in a given situation for a particular audience, then really it's just an instance of a folksonomy. And even if folksonomies are oftentimes dubbed "fauxonomies"... by their very nature, they are malleable, transient things that despite their rough and ready nature, do just work... most of the time.
Me, I'm quite happy to accept a trade-off between perfection and convenience. Sometimes it will mean we occasionally disembark at the wrong stop... but that's a whole new thing... Serendipity...
Keywords: classification, folksonomy, information technology, taxonomy