Cartographer's Toolkit

In the LINKS section, you’ll find a lot of great references to books on creativity. I highly recommend asking for one or two of these for Christmas (or for whatever you celebrate). Alternatively, see if your local library has them. Even if the library doesn’t have a copy, they often have a process by which patrons can request basically any book they want, and the library will get it for them (if you’re in the U.S.). These are fun books that don’t take a huge amount of brain power but which can help you along in many ways:

• If you need some new business ideas
• If you want to take your mapping to the next level
• If you want to be one of those “big idea people” at work
• If your current analytical processes need updating

Even if you don’t know how creativity science might help you I still recommend learning a little bit about it. The main thing for folks who are analysts and programmers, especially (but even cartographers sometimes), is that there are exercises that don’t take long, that anyone can do, that allow the brain to come up with novel approaches to the problems it’s mulling over.

The other day I was trying to solve a little analysis problem: how to construct a variable-width buffer that is dependent on elevation? I googled it and searched the Esri forums and got some ideas, but a solution was still elusive. I printed out some graph paper (here’s a site to print out graph paper) and tried to take a look at the problem visually. That got me a bit closer but still without a complete answer. Then I tried a creativity trick that I often employ – change of scenery. So, getting out from behind my desk and standing by the fireplace, I had the solution in about 5 minutes of thinking it through.

I’m a big reader, so I never feel like just one book is enough, but if there’s just one that you want to look at, I’d highly recommend this one: