In praise of intelligent paper maps – map² on Kickstarter

I am currently in Barcelona, a gorgeous but quite confusing town. Once again, I am getting the distinct feeling that we are becoming the slaves of the usefulness of our technologies as I find myself checking my phone for the map and places to go just to realise that I am not on roaming data and can not use either. So I get the worst experience:

• I am in a city notoriously known for its pickpockets
• I show a very expensive smart phone (or very scarce Geeksphone) while I am walking down the road
• I can not move around the map as Google Maps doesn’t allow me to cache the tiles here

Of course the hotel offers free maps which are huge and very much pinpoint me as a tourist and potential target. They also cover the whole city and don’t allow me to zoom into a level that I need. Which brings me to a great product a friend of mine created and I wrote about before: map² the intelligent map on paper.

map² is a paper map that solves the above issue. It is small, fits in your hand and allows you to zoom into the area you need:

So far the map is only available for Berlin and London, but here is the good news: Anne, the designer of the map started a kickstarter campaign to create the map as a city series. If she reaches the £20,000 goal she’ll create a similar map for New York with others to follow. You can even propose new cities using this form.

As I will be in New York soon, and suffer the same connection issues there, I’d love to be able to get one of them. Worthy cause to support?