Coordinates: How Systems Are Positioned

Every system exists in context. It doesn’t just behave a certain way—it lives somewhere. It sits within a structure, a hierarchy, a network, a map. That’s what the Coordinates are about.

These three dimensions—Longitude, Latitude, and Elevation—help us understand how systems are arranged. They’re not metaphors. They’re tools for making sense of complexity. When you know where something is positioned, you can see what it connects to, what it depends on, and how it scales.

These dimensions matter when you’re designing for ecosystems, organizations, platforms, and systems that need to grow without losing their integrity.

Longitude: Horizontal Reach

Longitude is about span—how far something travels across space, systems, or networks. It’s the horizontal dimension of connection. Think infrastructure, distribution, scalability.

At Meta’s Connectivity Lab, I worked on tools that mapped the expansion of internet access. We weren’t designing a single interface—we were designing a system that stretched across the globe. Longitude in that context meant thinking in lines, bridges, and points of access.

You see longitude in API architecture, logistics, transportation, even in social networks. It’s what lets systems reach across distance while still staying connected.

The wider your longitude, the more potential for reach—and the more responsibility to keep it coherent.

Latitude: Vertical Context and Layers

Latitude is about layers—depth, strata, and hierarchy. It describes how meaning builds on top of other meaning. While longitude is about stretch, latitude is about depth.

At DroneDeploy, I worked on tools that layered aerial imagery with contextual data—altitude, growth patterns, environmental indicators. It wasn’t just about what you could see; it was about what those layers meant when read together. That’s latitude: seeing across levels of information, not just surfaces.

In digital systems, latitude shows up in permission levels, dashboards, architecture, and data views. It helps you know where you are vertically—what layer you’re on, and how it relates to the others.

Designing for latitude means accounting for multiple levels of meaning, access, and understanding—without overwhelming the user.

Elevation: Systems-Level Perspective

Elevation is the view from above. It’s not about where something is, but how it’s seen—especially from a systems-level perspective. Elevation reveals patterns, hierarchies, and relationships you can’t always see from the ground.

At Facebook, I worked on the Pages Growth & Science team—building backend systems that influenced how content surfaces. We weren’t curating directly. We were shaping the architecture behind visibility—what rises, what fades, what reaches scale. That’s elevation.

Elevation is essential in any system that operates at scale. It’s strategy. It’s signal vs. noise. It’s the ability to see across the whole map and know where to apply pressure.

When you design with elevation in mind, you stop optimizing for the moment—and start shaping the system.

Why Coordinates Matter

You can design the perfect product, tell the right story, or launch with perfect timing—but if you don’t know where your system lives, it can still fail.

Longitude gives you reach.

Latitude gives you depth.

Elevation gives you clarity.

Coordinates help you place things within larger systems. They show you how components interact, where power accumulates, and where confusion might live. They’re how you scale without getting lost. They’re how you stay structured while expanding.

If Fundamentals are what something is, and Orientations are how it behaves, Coordinates are where it lives—and how it fits.