In Christmas 2000, when I was ten and still excited about it, my uncle gave me an atlas for Christmas. I barely glanced at its maps of cities and roads; it was chaptered by continent, and each was introduced with two full facing pages of colorful visualizations. A map of rainfall, a map of temperatures, a map of endangered species, a map of mineral resources, a map of soil types, and probably others I’ve forgotten, though I still remember the page’s layout and vivid color schemes. They were too beautiful, too cool, not to emulate.
So I used them to daydream a new continent, Zealia, (New Zealand plus Australia, what could be better?) placed directly over Sri Lanka (whose rainfall and temperatures looked perfect on the Asia map), with my favorite endangered species and the coolest minerals (gold, lots of uranium, yttrium, other exotic-sounding mineables). This utopian speculation, turning those beautiful analyses into play, is still at the core of how I work and how I teach design.
But the atlas’ choices of what to show, and my following of them, were of course almost parodically colonial, designed for extraction and exoticization. People, such as the miners of those intriguingly-named metals, were never shown, nor languages, though I saved a few Sri Lankan names for cities. Never did I consider that all those endangered species might not have to be endangered to be worth putting on a map. As I learned more about history, power, and privilege, I began to unpack my vivid memories of Zealia, and pull up some roots of its design and my desires. This critical reflexivity, doing the work to find uncomfortable truths and reasons, is also at the core of how I think, work, and teach. When I play with utopias now, I try to do so critically and collaboratively: when I am guided by my hopes, I work also to be guided by the knowledges of people who aren’t shown on the map.