Roadbooks, Part 1: How We Used to Navigate
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As fascinating as it is to watch trained industrial designers do their thing, I find it equally interesting to see non-designers doing design without realizing it.
To set this one up, I have to go back in time a bit. In 1990, I was a teenager who needed to drive from Alfred, New York to Oakmont, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh. It was a couple hundred miles and there were no major interstates connecting the origin and destination. Furthermore this was pre-GPS, pre-internet, pre-cellphone; the only thing I had was a road atlas, something they used to sell in every gas station.
Even at 18 I’d been on enough solo roadtrips to know how to do it: You needed the atlas, a ruler, a pencil, three differently-colored pens and a notebook.
First you broke out the atlas and used a pencil to draw a straight line between Point A and B.
The problem was that traveling between states, Point A and B were on different pages, so you had to find some border town that was visible on both maps, try to figure out if that border town was the shortest distance between A and B, and use that as Point A-and-a-half.
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