Part 1: Beck Revolutionises the Tube Map in 1931

The year is 1931 in London. An unassuming engineering draughtsman by the name of Harry Beck started his career drawing schematics for the electrical system of the underground train network. What he didn’t know was how his journey of drafting would lead him to create one of design’s most important pieces: London’s Underground subway system, also known as the Tube map.

It was not like any other map. Unlike his predecessors, his map took a radical twist out of the norms. He would remove geographical accuracy by stripping distance measurements and prioritising the subway systems over other information. Next, he instilled geometrical beauty by creating straight lines while incorporating a recognisable feature, such as the Thames River, to signify landmarks in their context.

As expected, anything new would meet skeptics, and Beck was no exception. After all, how could a technical draughtsman be an innovative cartographer? The initial design would meet rejection on a couple of occasions before his perseverance paid off when he was allowed 500 copies to be distributed at a few stations in 1932. The rest was history a year later, when seven hundred thousand copies were printed and reprinted only after a month of publication.

Einstellung Effect and the Challenge in Design Thinking

What made Beck’s map so successful? Perhaps he knew that topological information would not appeal to train passengers, since most of them were commuting underground. Or perhaps he incidentally stumbled into the right time of the modernist design movement, suiting the taste of consumers who were looking for simplicity in information design. Whatever the combinations were, with a little courage and freedom (he was unemployed while creating the map), he gave rise to a new visual language of urban…