For a great example of unexpected outcomes of a design, take a look at Map of the Strange. This site is devoted to tracking the quirky satellite footage used in Google Maps.
A strange blemish in the satellite photo over Hilversum in the Netherlands is captured for posterity.
Among the interesting view-from-space images are a Native American with an iPod (near Medicine Hat, Alberta), the work of an avid St. Louis Cardinal fan who made crop circles, the Cerne Abbas Giant (near Southhampton, UK), and a giant marriage proposal in Western Massachusetts. There are also images with small aircraft and photo blemishes, like the one above a building in Hilversum (Netherlands) that is tagged as a ‘black hole.’
Map of the Strange switched servers recently to accommodate a boost in traffic. More eyeballs means more mice adding entries and a new bunch of problems:
An increasing number of visitors are looking at mapofstrange.com and scitor.co.uk, and as a result an increasingly large number of new records are being added – thanks for that! However, this means that we’re getting lots more people telling us where they live, and where Brazil or India or Spain is. Thanks very much for your help, it’s reassuring to know that elementary geography is still being taught in schools, and that the money and time invested by the Google corporation to produce Google maps and Google earth isn’t going to waste. However, we really aren’t interested. Seriously. We couldn’t give a damn that you know the whereabouts of New York. And, again, you might be surprised that nobody wants to know where you live, but hey, we don’t! But if you’ve seen something interesting (a WWII bomber in Northern Italy), unusual (a car flying through the air), or stupid (a giant penis painted on the roof of a school), we really want to hear from you.
It is difficult to imagine this kind of site every coming up in development meetings at Google.