Simplify
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By design, Lost in Seattle is very simple.
It does not answer questions. It does not give directions. It does not ask where you’re going, tell you what it likes, try to read your mind or pretend to be a butler. It is just a map that shows everything, and then gets out of the way so you can decide for yourself what interests you. It gives you a starting point, and the rest is for your discovery.
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Follow nature
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The things in a neighborhood are already naturally related by geography, and it’s how you experience them in real life. Traditional directories have always tried to "let your fingers do the walking", but it’s really nothing like walking, is it? If you find something interesting in their alphabetical listings, you still have to mentally translate a cryptic address to a physical location before you can go there. If you want to know what’s nearby, forget it. Web-based directories just tack on a search function that will only overload you with more geographically befuddling information. By using a map interface, Lost in Seattle's first level of organization is geographic nearness. Once you find something interesting, the first thing you'll notice is where it is and what's nearby.
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Don’t get lost | And it's easy to find something interesting, because Lost in Seattle combines the serendipity of walking with the power of a search engine. That means you don’t have to know in advance exactly what you want, because you can just browse with your mouse. But if you do know what you want, you can still search for specific places and categories just like any other web-based index. Since whatever you look up leads directly to a clickable map, you can instantly switch back and forth between either mode of exploring. You always know where you are no matter what you’ve discovered. |
Depth is the new breadth |
Most online maps are generated on-the-fly from low-resolution data files that cover the whole country and were never meant to be very accurate. Streets, addresses, and store locations are plotted theoretically, which means that stores often end up in the wrong place and streets that are perfectly straight seem to meander like cow paths. This may be "good enough" for armchair travelers in Schenectady or somewhere, but not for us locals. The maps you will find on this site are drawn by surveyors who actually were there, to represent the things any pedestrian would see, and to convey a sense of what the neighborhood is like. |
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