Michael Lissack point of a #2 pencil. "Every time there is a dispute," observes French sociol- ogist Bruno Latour, "great pains are taken to find or sometimes to invent a new instrument of visualization, which will enhance the image, accelerate the readings. . . and conspire with the visual characteristics of things that lend themselves to diagrams on paper-coast lines, well-aligned cells, etc." When words and numbers fail us, we feel we have no choice but to turn to representations that give us another way of grasping reality. Maps and three-dimensional models are frequently the tools of choice. In his intriguing book The Image of the City, urban designer Kevin Lynch asked dozens of Boston residents to draw maps of their city. The landmarks they included or ignored revealed a great deal about where they lived and how they felt about the city. Lynch discovered that people carried a mental map of the city inside their heads that they used to orient them- selves and give directions to others. Research with Parisians by cognitive psychologists revealed that different age groups have different mental maps of their cities and their neighborhoods. These maps are the metaphor for the way the residents view where they live. Mere words, mere addresses don't adequately capture the way they see their city. One of the great challenges of communication (and collaboration) is to convey these mental maps. How do you get others to see the world as you do? For our officials the task is even more complex. The mental map of de- cision making, of problems, of resources, contains information of which the average citizen is unaware. Yet, if policy is to succeed, if it is to be embraced by the governed as well as the governors it must be understood. The surfeit of information drowns out the map. It is as if we each walked around with the phone book in our head instead of a mental map of the streets. Knowing the phone numbers of each of the residents and stores won't tell us where to go for a great cup of coffee. Our mental maps are not just the key to the physical world, but also the key to the world of decision making. In the decision making world, we are poor map-makers. Again the prob- lem is too much information. We all possess disturbing habits that block us from clearly seeing what occurs or from conveying our thoughts to oth- ers. As Richard Saul Worman phrased it in his book Information Anxiety
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