I recently waxed poetic on the power of innovation. So how do you decide if something is a needed innovation or innovation for innovation’s sake? Is it just a distraction, a fad, a nuisance or gimmick? Is it a needed change or just a usability nightmare? It can be very hard when caught up in the spirit of something exciting and new to tell the difference. Unless we are embroiled in the innovation ourselves we usually get to take a removed stance and rely on 20/20 hindsight. In our hindsight we get to laugh at the blindness of the naysayers of needed innovations or at the naivety of the proponents of fads and gimmicks. Try not to laugh so hard next time because it’s not so easy at the time.

Here is an innovation I can get behind. Let’s start teaching kids at an early age that ALL maps are fictions. That the only accurate representation of something is the thing itself (leaving aside Kantian epistemological concerns until at least High School). If the only maps we grow up seeing are the same old projections of geographically focused maps then everything else looks both foreign and wrong.

Here are two maps that show results of the recent U.S. presidential election. Both show how Obama won the urban centers and McCain won the surrounding rural areas. The map on the right has made size a function of population, not geography, and it uses shades between red and blue. The one on the right, from Physicist Mark Newman, is the more informative and innovative of the two. Are we open enough to cartographic innovations? Why didn’t I see something this informative on CNN, ABC, NBC or CBS on election night?

Get the complete story on Mark Newman’s new electoral map in this short video.