Made by a scientist who opens map files all day

Hi, I’m Ken

I study cities as places where people, buildings and climate meet. At NYU Shanghai I lead the Climate and Urban Environments (CLUEs) Lab. We look at how the amount, height and arrangement of buildings shape heat exposure, flood risk and the materials a city is made of. Our tools are satellite data, climate models and causal inference, applied to thousands of cities at once.

Before NYU Shanghai, I earned my PhD at the Yale School of the Environment and was an Advanced Study Program Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

Why I made NimbleMap

Almost all of my research starts with a file somebody shared: a Shapefile of city boundaries, a NetCDF of temperatures, a CSV of coordinates. QGIS and ArcGIS are remarkable tools that professionals rely on every day. But open one for the first time and you meet hundreds of tools, a project to set up and a coordinate system to choose before you see a single map. My students and many colleagues don’t have that training, and they shouldn’t need it just to see what a file contains.

So I asked a different question: what if a GIS were designed the way Apple designs its apps? What would its makers keep, what would they hide, and what would they refuse to ship? Surely not a toolbox with a thousand buttons. More likely a window that shows your map the moment you open a file, and one click that tells you something true about it. NimbleMap is my answer to that thought experiment. It isn’t a smaller QGIS. It’s a map app for everyone who is curious about places, not only the people trained to run GIS software.

A few ideas guide every decision:

• The map comes first. No wizard, no project screen. You open a file and see a map, and the interface stays quiet so your data can take centre stage.
• It just opens. Drag in a file and the app works out the coordinates, the text encoding and the styling. When it has to guess, it says so in one plain line, and one click changes it.
• Answers before tools. People want to know what something is and whether it’s unusual. Click a typhoon and its card says its winds were stronger than 99% of storms on record. The tools are one step behind the answer.
• Honest answers. Every number comes from your data, never from what happens to be drawn on screen, and your original files are never changed.
• Every step can be undone. Curiosity needs a safety net, so you can try anything.

It runs on your own computer, and your files stay there. (NimbleMap is an independent project, not affiliated with Apple, Esri or the QGIS project.)

My research and projects

My website, kangning-huang.com, has my publications, my lab and interactive maps from my research. Among them are maps of how much buildings in cities weigh, urban expansion to 2050, 3D flood risk, and how urban renewal cools neighbourhoods.

Get in touch

Questions, ideas, bugs or a dataset that won’t open: write to [email protected], or use Send Feedback in the app. NimbleMap is built on the open-source RustGIS.