Back in 2015 the Commission committed to providing a critique of a map a day for an entire year which resulted in (actually a few more than) 365 maps with some brief comments about what made them work. The intent was to create an atlas of examples of great map design to help people to find inspiration for their own work.

We’re now ten years on from that daily effort and we’re going to do it again… but with a twist. Rather than share examples of maps we know, love, and think evidence great design we’re going to publish maps that WE make, every single day in 2016. With due respect to Topi Tjukanov‘s fantastic grass-roots community led 30 Day Map Challenge we’re going to dial it up to 11 and do one a day for an entire year.

Two questions come to mind… why? and how?

The technology that we use to make maps tends to shift in leaps. While the art and science remains relatively unchanged there tends to be a shift in technology once every decade or so. In 2015 we wanted to share maps to counter the problems with early web mapping efforts as people moved towards online mapping (or who entered the field of mapping upon discovery that maps can be designed by code). With immature technology came pretty rudimentary maps. It’s the classic one step forward, two back, as people grappled with new and emerging technology and shifted their map production workflows. It takes time for design to catch up. We’re at a new inflection point with the emergence of AI. And that will provide the focus of our endeavour because we’re seeing similar issues emerging.

So… can we encourage better mapping through developing an awareness of how to use AI to make a half-decent map? and can we work towards establishing best practices through our experimentation?

We’ll therefore be creating a map, every single day, to illustrate the use of AI for making maps. These will (at least to begin with) be built using Web Mapper GPT. Each map will be built using ONLY a natural language prompt. And we’ll publish them here on the Map Design Commission blog with a copy of the prompts used to make the map. Things may change across the year given this is fast-moving technology. And we fully expect the maps we’re able to produce by year-end to be quite different in quality than those that we are able to create at the outset. That said, we think you’ll be staggered to see what is achievable already.

Much like Topi published a set of 30 topics for the 30 day map challenge every November we need topics, but for each day of the year. It seems like every single day of the year is dedicated to some sort of international or national cause or other, some serious, some not so. These will be our topics. We’ll pick a ’cause’ from each day of the year and make a map that in some way riffs off that idea. Some will be serious, some not so.

We hope you’ll join us each day, and follow our journey as we explore ways to use AI to make maps, and how we can develop best practices for map design along the way. Either come back to this blog each day to check-in, or follow #365daymapchallenge on X, or Bluesky, and with occasional summaries on LinkedIn. And of course this is only our sandpit…YOU can use Web Mapper GPT yourself to experiment making your own natural-language driven maps.

See you on January 1st, and Happy Mapping!

Ken, and Ian, on behalf of the Map Design Commission