If Cars Were Lightning, This Is What Thanksgiving Traffic Would Look Like

Half the battle of developing a new technology is figuring out where exactly the market value is in it. Take early suggestions for home desktop 3D-printing projects, for example — paperweights, hermit crab shells, and other myriad tchotchkes with varying degrees of uselessness. These days, advances in data collection and satellite visualization have enormous potential — for what exactly, we’re still not sure. While we leave that to the scientists to figure out, we’ve already got visualizations of New York under Stay Puft Marshmallow Man siege; the exact locations of where our LinkedIn contacts work; and even "'the shadows cast by half-finished Chinese buildings' as a possible indicator for where China's economy might be headed” (thanks for calling that to our attention, BLDGBLOG). Such showcase projects reveal the new pursuit of bringing numbers to artistic life and then trying to parse meaning from it. In time for the holidays, as snow is set to pummel the East Coast Thanksgiving commute, we stumbled upon another entertaining visual interpretation of life-driven data: a map of the New York City area by the designers at Imagework that illustrates the long haul after your flight home (as if that weren’t ...