(Cross-posted on the Google Lat Long Blog.)
Google Moon and Google Mars are great examples of products that required much more than pure software engineering to produce. There was quite a bit of science, and even a little bit of artistry, that went into their creation. They both expose large volumes of imagery and information in simple and accessible designs, and it turns out that I'm not the only one who thinks that they qualify as art in this regard.
New York's Museum of Modern Art has honored both products by including them in their exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind, which opens to the public on February 24th. The exhibit showcases objects and systems that pair modern design with innovations in science and engineering in creative ways. Google Moon's Apollo landing panoramas and Google Mars' imagery of the largest canyons and volcanoes in the solar system were intended to do exactly that, by applying Google Maps technology to places that are out of this world.
