A Japanese website posted our ZoomArt!

The Japanese Business news web Magazine “Media Makoto” featured the Crumpled City maps (12 April 2012). The writer was very intrigued with the concept, design as well as packaging of the Crumpled City.
This is the interview he made to Cristina (head of Palomar Communication Office)

1. How did you get an idea of the crumpled map?

For Centuries maps have been irreplaceable learning tools. They have to do with travelling, discovery, adventure.

The Crumpled City™ Map – designed by Emanuele Pizzolorusso - reinterprets an object which historically has been synonymous with exacting precision and manual skills.

Actually, maps must be opened, folded to find what we are interested in and then folded away, preferably along the original folds of the paper.

But, how often are such operations difficult and frustrating? Especially when we are lost and have to pull out of our pockets or our bag a map that often, through  use and the difficulty of folding it, has turned into a mass of wet, swollen paper, which forces us to engage in an impossible exercise in the art of “origami” to consult it and finally get our bearings!

These are the reflections around which the Crumpled City™ maps have been designed: maps that are soft, extremely light but very strong, perfect waterproof, designed to be quickly put away in their bag, without having to be folded but just scrunched up, rocked up into a ball. Crumpled City indeed.

At the core of the design is this “playing” with gesture: this allowing people to do something that is usually “forbidden”, that is to simply scrunch up a document. It is a liberating, fun act, especially if you do it with something that you are not going to throw away, but which is actually made to be kept and reused.  

2. How did you develop the map product? By your in-house staff? or with designers outside?

The designer of the Crumpled City™ maps – Emanuele Pizzolorusso - is an Italian freelance designer who has been living  in Finland.

The project of the Crumpled City™ maps has been a project shared from the beginning by both Palomar (in-house staff) and Emanuele Pizzolorusso.

The product is the result of their mutual collaboration since its start in the year 2010.

3. Who are the customers of this map? 

The customers have in common the pleasure to buy these maps as a gift, a memory associated with a place, to keep and collect.  

They are contemporary travelers who are not only oriented towards “smart phone based application maps”; they appreciate the digital maps but they like also these maps because they are “designed” and have a completely new look, they are easy to use, more fun and inspire more freedom than traditional maps.

The costumers are curious people, who love amazing ideas…

Color and graphics are part of the design project. The designer chooses to simplify the street mapping without decreasing the map’s functionality.

It is possible to write on the map and to create your own personal map.    

4. How are the sales so far?

The sales are very good.  We sale the Crumpled City™ maps very well all over the world. The current collection includes 31 cities and it is growing up…

The Crumpled City™ are award-winning maps: I send you in attachment the list of design awards received by the maps so far.

5. Why did the lens company make the map? Could you explain about your company?

Palomar is not an optic company: it is a design company which has some optical objects in its collection. The whole collection finds its consistency in a desire to observe and comprehend the world. All the design objects produced by Palomar result from this desire.

The desire to observe and comprehend the world  has to be intended in a wider sense: it involves, for example, the concept of Space and Time. It is a desire peculiar of the human beings…  

In our design collection this never-ending desire, stimulates the research of original ideas; these ideas sometimes became objects. We produce design objects which are analogue (and not digital) BUT which are also involved in the contemporary way of life as well as interesting for people of to-day.

The Crumpled City™ maps are a perfect  model of our research: they are contemporary but also “traditional”.

Furthermore, all the objects part of our design collection lay stress on the direct experience instead of the indirect one…

(http://bizmakoto.jp/makoto/articles/1204/12/news007.html)