Modelling

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To work with the environment we need to express the patterns of nature in a way that many people of different backgrounds can readily grasp.

The challenge is to avoid information overload and make graphic symbols intuitive and easy to understand.

As many different categories of information have to coexist in the thematic maps, we have to group them, simplify them and make them transparent to each other.

The landforms, the climate, the surface hydrology, the geology and the soils, all viewed together can saturate the graphics support. Their images must be smplified and made to mesh together.

The starting point is to get a clear picture of the topography, bearing in mind a mental model of the flows and patterns of the ecosystem.

The next step is to organize the picture of the landscape into interlocking branch patterns of ridges and hollows.

This is easily achieved by showing how the morning sun illuminates the slopes, and how the surface drainage forms itself into a network of gullies.

On that base we can overlay different wind-flow patterns and highlight the places where the currents climb up the slopes (orographic contacts).

Also of major relevance is the mapping of the hollows, where the water slows down, soils accumulate and the vegetation tends to thrive.

With a set of transparent overlays we can combine the different factors as the analysis requires, and that way avoid saturating the graphics support.

Ian McHarg proposes a method whereby each layer of information is coded so that the areas most suited for development appear lighter; a great help to the planner.

Today, we can make the patterns corresponding to each one of the physical factors appear as needed with low-cost interactive computer graphics.

A Graphics Language for Reading Nature.