Mapping like a monster

[Gamerprinter]

To me the issue would be alien ways of thinking, how can a human (us in reality) emulate a non-humans concept of reality, space, distance. There's an old wood cut illustration I've seen that elucidates this concept of different realities well. There is an illustration by a 19th century artist of a famous Maori chief that shows a realistic man with tattoos on his face wearing a western styled suit. A self portrait by that same Maori chief showed only the tattoos, and not anything else, not even the facial features surrounding the tattoo. His perception of the world and himself, is completely different from our point of view. Not that a non-human couldn't design a map for his needs, but could a non-human actually understand the map, especially when the cartographer has a completely alien perception of the world and how to depict it. If you are just using orc-ish composition, but using our own perception of reality - would it even be close to an orc emulation of the world?

Think about the movie, Contact, with Jodie Foster. When they received the aliens instructions on building the time/space traveling device, nobody could read it. The billionaire friend of Jodie points out that the map is read as a cylinder (or as a sphere, I can't remember for sure) and not a 2D flat surface. Until pointed out how the map was to be read, nobody could read it. That I see is the problem for realistically attempting to design a map using non-human thinking.