We might be biased (let's be honest, maps are pretty damn cool), but hearing that a new world map had won the Japan Institute of Design Promotion's Good Design Award got us rather excited. Then it turned out that this winner is the most accurate map ever made, and the excitement tripled. Created by architect and artist Hajime Narukawa, this world map is still rectangular, sure, but actually manages to show the world in a proportionally correct manner.
In the Mercator Projection, the most widely used map format for centuries now, the issue of making a sphere (Earth) a rectangle wasn't exactly solved, leading to Greenland looking as big as the entire African continent – when in reality the former is vastly smaller than the latter.
This distortion indirectly influences how people may see the world, as some note – in terms of climate change, the idea of shrinking ice caps probably seems a lot less urgent if you imagine Greenland and Antarctica to be vastly bigger than in real life.
Saving the day is Narukawa's design, called Authagraph. His original creation was inspired by the 1946 Dymaxion Projection, created by Buckminster Fuller. This map managed to keep the proportions of the world intact (if you fold it along the lines, it creates a sphere), but the slight downside was that it dismissed the rectangular shape, thereby slicing up the oceans instead. Studies on sea currents and the like sure become a little more complex with this one.
To combat both the Mercator projection's proportion problem and the Dymaxion's non-rectangular one, Narukawa divided the world into 96 different sections and then printed them onto an inflated pyramid (or tetrahedron – in his words, an onigiri shape) while still keeping the same ratios within the 96 sections. By flattening it and then cutting along the edges, a new, proportionally fully accurate (but still rectangular) world map was born – oceans included. Just for the hell of it, Authagraph released a foldable map that turns into a sphere, too.
Pretty cool, if we may say so. If you want to get your hands on one of these maps or paper globes, they're available here – check out Narukawa's TED Talk about the project on the same page.