🍰 Cake's Take on the 450-year-old default nobody thought to question
I was watching an episode of The West Wing (with the Big Block of Cheese Day, if you know, you know) and I was stunned to find out that the world map I know is wrong.
The “Mercator projection” has been the default world map since 1569, designed for sailors and navigation purposes, and it does that job brilliantly. The problem is that somewhere along the way, it became the default for everything else too, in classrooms, in textbooks, on Google Maps…
While it’s tricky to flatten a sphere onto a 2D surface and make it representative, the map most of us know as the default is HUGELY distorted, for example:
- On the default map, Greenland appears roughly the same size as Africa.
- In reality, Africa is 14 TIMES LARGER than Greenland and you could fit the United States, China, India and most of Europe inside Africa and still have room left over.
As the African Union's Deputy Chairperson put it, when the size of Africa is misrepresented on maps, the world's perception of the continent is also distorted, including in media, education and policy. "It might seem to be just a map, but in reality, it is not".
This is a tool that was designed for one purpose, adopted as the default for everything. In research and insight, we inherit defaults all the time. Research approaches, question wording, visualisation templates, benchmarks, norms, even professional partnerships, all come with assumptions. By using them without ever asking whether they're still fit for purpose, we risk shaping outcomes in ways we don’t even notice.
Is there something that you’re currently doing day in and day out that needs to be seen with fresh eyes? The world map I thought I knew going largely unchallenged for over 450 years has certainly made me think a little differently about things today.
#CakesTake#CakeConsulting#SmallBusiness#QuestionEverything
Sources: Wikipedia/Mercator projection; NPR, August 2025 (African Union Correct The Map campaign); Visual Capitalist (True Size of Africa).
Also, you can back the "Correct The Map" campaign here: https://correctthemap.org/
