The field of construction makes extensive use of drawings and maps. However, their use has become so commonplace that there is little discussion of what it means to represent something on a map. Professional education in drawing, cartography, and surveying focuses on how to represent the shapes and dimensions of buildings and plots of land in an accurate manner. However, in the course of planning and design, thinking may also take place at the same time as drawing. The way in which maps are drawn can make a difference in how one thinks. With respect to the development of such thoughts, there has hardly been any discussion of maps as a "method" of thought that makes use of the visual as opposed to "understanding something upon seeing it."

The general image of maps includes the positive attitude among some people that they are "useful and interesting," while others may have the unwelcome view that maps are "difficult and tedious." In addition, some people have said that maps are no longer needed given the widespread use of GPS, and in recent years, drivers do not need maps at all in an automatic driving setting. However, it is important to understand that this is limited only to the case of using maps to find one's way to a pre-determined location, which represents a tiny fraction of the diverse range of possibilities offered by maps.

Various types of maps with different scales and purposes exist, starting with the globes that are 3D. Hazard maps and three-dimensional digital models of urban areas have also come into use in recent years. What these maps have in common is the fact that we do not see the objects themselves but instead symbolic information represented on a medium, from which we infer the objects as the meaning of such information. Communicating in this way through the process of substitution is a linguistic act, and the concept of cartographic language exists for maps. Maps can take a variety of different forms, including drawings on paper, images that change dynamically like digital maps on a display, and even images in one's mind before they are substituted by something else. What is a map again? Let us explore the beauty of maps from various angles.

How far can the oldest map in the world be traced back to? A question like this is equivalent to asking when the spoken word first emerged among human beings, which is not known. However, it is known that we have found objects from the past that resemble physical maps. Among them are mountains and rivers drawn on animal tusks, volcanoes and settlements drawn on the walls of caves, and settlements carved into rock, but since writing had not emerged yet, we cannot confirm what they represent. Moreover, because several thousand years have passed, it is difficult to corroborate the spaces drawn with actual spaces of the present.

In Japan, the Map of Reclaimed Fields at Todai-ji Temple (todaiji kaidenzu), which was created around the 8th century, still exists. The map illustrates the grid-like layout of farmland and shows how land was managed under the Ritsuryo system during that period. Large spaces are reduced in size in maps and drawings. While house plans are drawn at scales of around 1:100 and city plans at 1:2500, topographic maps by the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan use even smaller scales of 1:25000 or higher. The zoom factor of a camera ranges from several times to several dozen times, allowing the correspondence between the image and the actual object to be grasped intuitively, but this is more challenging with topographic maps, whose images are several thousand times smaller than the actual objects.

The use of language involves both syntax, or how we choose what we wish to say and the order of our words, and semantics, or whether the meaning of what we say is conveyed as intended. The same applies to maps, which involves selecting the kind of cartographic symbols used to stand in for what we wish to say as well as the order of these symbols, and evaluating the extent to which such a map successfully conveys what we wish to say. And, just as our native language taught to us by our parents, it is necessary to learn some form of visual representation. At what age does a person become able to draw a map?

The spatial layout is also not proportionate to actual distances but has been expanded and contracted as necessary to simplify the structure. Animals and plants closely associated with the student's life and play are painstakingly included in a symbolic manner. On the other hand, words are written for objects that cannot be represented with shapes, such as bridges and parking lots, but only common nouns are used without any proper names of specific places. In addition, the student ran out of paper while drawing and extended the map by around one-third from the top. There is no indication of any attempt to shrink the drawing in advance to fit the entire area on the paper. There are no restrictions in terms of the map's scale, orientation, place names, or legends, as is typical of modern maps, and the student was free to depict their neighborhood with themself at the center of it.

It is said that children start being able to think abstractly from the fifth or sixth grade. In other words, they would be able to rotate a map in their mind to grasp the relationship between locations and infer distances between two points. The map described above, however, is a form of free representation that is unaffected by such demands of orientation and scale. It is truly a child's map, but one that is also sufficiently comprehensible for adults.

Topographic maps created by states since the modern era stipulate map projection to achieve metric (*1) functions and homogeneity of content, but on the other hand, these restrictions are incompatible with content such as image maps based on an individual's spatial perceptions. While this lays the groundwork for a map's positive qualities of being accurate and reliable, it may also make the map unimaginative and uninteresting to some users.

*1　A measurement standard. General maps created by measurement are known as metric maps.