What three words?
Before the pandemic I was in the habit of holding occasional events in central Brighton. Frustratingly, there were always a few people who would phone or text in a confused state because they could not find the venue and I would take 15 minutes to wander around the neighbourhood gathering up the lost souls. Whilst maps, postcodes and smartphones will successfully enable navigation to many urban locations experience tells us there are plenty of blindspots and for whatever reason 21c handheld devices had definitely not enabled these individuals to home in on New England House, leaving them temporarily hapless and helpless in the urban jungle.
Normally I dont like saying “there’s an app for that” except as a joke. However it turns out a company called what3words promises to address this kind of occurrence because unlike the postcode system it charts the entire globe in 3m squares. Instead of a conventional grid reference every square has a reference comprising three words, thus avoiding unrelated digits or even combinations of digits/ letters like a postcode. For example once you’re in the app, a reference slurs.this.shark will take you to the front door of No 10 Downing Street, fakes.round.district will whisk you to the Acropolis in Athens, and (should you ever wish to see penguins in the wild) specular.pamphlet.zigs maps to a chilly spot on the coast of Antarctica. In each case the string of words is more or less memorable, and the advantages of that alone would seem potentially significant.
According to the Wiki, what3words founders Chris Sheldrick and Mohan Ganesalingam conceived the idea when Sheldrick, working as an event organiser, struggled to get bands and equipment to music venues using inadequate address information. Sheldrick tried using GPS coordinates to locate the venues, but decided words were better than numbers after a one-digit error led him to the wrong location. He credits a mathematician friend for the idea of dividing the world into three-metre squares, and the linguist Jack Whaley Cohen with using memorable words. The company was incorporated in March 2013 and a patent application for the core technology filed in April 2013. In November 2013, what3words raised US$500,000 of seed funding and currently employs 50 people.
Could we even end up abandoning postcodes and going over to a more location-specific form of georeferencing? That remains to be seen. In the meantime if you dont yet appreciate the advantages of a system which maps as precisely as this, pop over and I will tell you what I know about it. Our studio is at what3words ///ending.switch.gravel