Mapping and visualization is a huge area of work and is of interest to many people. We're working on reinventing a new kind of 3D cartography to make it easier to tell stories with 3D maps.

We tell stories with maps about global warming, biodiversity; we can design more livable cities, track the spread of epidemics. That makes a difference.

We started with things like locating ski runs or locating a transmission line corridor or locating a new town or doing a coastal zone plan. We ourselves weren't doing the planning work, but we were doing all the mapping work for the landscape architects and planners who would subsequently incorporate the maps into their actual designs.

I'm a native New Yorker, so I'm edgier; I kind of tell it like it is.

I wanted to make my stories, which are inspired by Asian stories, into something fresh, decontextualized - to give them new life as a new kind of fantasy that isn't so cloying and exotic and strange.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.