In the early days of the internet, you had to know a website’s URL in order to visit it.
Companies like Yahoo! set themselves up as way-finders. Visit their site and you could find links to popular places on the web. All organised under headings like a giant directory.
And then a little company called Google came along and started building its own map of the web, based on exploration. Its bots would crawl the web, visit each website one at a time, figure out what it was about, and then follow the links from there. Which connections are strong? Which are weak? Which way does the traffic flow?
This is a very different approach to knowledge gathering. Not based on a top-down hierarchy but on-the-ground mapping based on simple questions.
What is here, what is happening, which ways are things going?
With Google’s tool, all you had to do was search — they had the map, and it was a much better representation than Yahoo’s top-down approach.
Of course, who owns the map, and what they use it to do, are important questions too.
But the underlying premise remains, if we want to really understand a situation, then get on the ground and start moving around.
Related tools
>Continuous Place-Based Design
>Systems Survey