Use of participatory design methods for urban mapping
Seminar III: Doing with Theory
Introduction
A person’s connection with a place is built over time through individual experiences. The plethora of resources available help us attain knowledge through representations and information but the holistic understanding of a place is created only through real-world engagement with the environment. Maps, whether they are paper or digital, provide us with a knowledge of our environment. They help us build mental models of places. However, places carry the weight of history, perspectives, and politics that have gone into creating them. Through my thesis, I’m interested in exploring approaches to interactive systems with maps that can help people build a deeper understanding of place and facilitate delightful experiences.
Typically, contemporary maps show boundaries and features of cities and neighborhoods. However, local trends and activities of people are often lost in these so-called objective, data-driven visualizations. Cities are also lived experiences of the people and their interactions drive the life in a city. Understanding this visceral layer of experience helps in forming a close cognitive understanding of a place.
Parallel work
There have been a few works done in this direction both as a participatory workshop and as longer works of research. I found Lize Mogel’s Crowdsourced City workshop as a good starting off point for designing my own activity.
The next project that informed my process was MAPLAB by Superflux in 2018. It aimed to capture cartographic imaginaries of children in the city Eindhoven. Through the project, the organizers wanted to see how, by looking at the way children imagine up the city, they could expose the planners and the city officials to design cities to be inclusive for all.
I also situate my work close to the Visualizing Mental Maps of San Francisco project done by Rachelle Annechino & Yo-Shang Cheng in 2011. As state by them, the study “a qualitative investigation of how San Francisco residents perceive neighborhood and space in the city; and information visualizations informed by the qualitative work, creating an atlas of ‘mental maps’”.
Objective
This exercise was intended to serve as a base for a larger research topic I’m interested in exploring. Through this activity, I wanted to do a qualitative investigation of how students perceive and connect with different neighborhoods and landmarks in the city. I used a mapping exercise in order to answer the following question-
Can participatory mapping give us a way to surface people’s understanding, relations and interaction with urban spaces?
In a nutshell, students were provided with a map of Pittsburgh and a few probes questions. They were asked to plot on a map the places they associated with each of those specific questions. Viewed individually it gives an overview of an individual’s experience of the city and if viewed collectively it gives us a higher level sense of how a certain demographic, case in point here being CMU students, interact with the city.
Due to constraints of time and resources, this was done in an analog format. In the future, I am interested in developing in the future a methodology or preferably a digital toolkit that can be developed based on my learning from this.
Procedure
The procedure for this was pretty simple. I set-up a large printed map in the graduate studio. I also set-up emoji icon stickers along with the map. Each of those icons was representative of the probe questions put up. Students were then asked to plot on the map the stickers over a neighborhood or a landmark in the city which was indicative of the questions. Examples included, “Where is your first memory of the city?” or “Where do you regret not going?”
The set up was put up for 1 week. Instead of organizing a focussed session with participants I organized it more like an installation. People curious to see the installation went up to it and realized the questions. Looking at them they were intrigued to put up stickies themselves.
In retrospect, I did have some difficulties with the scale of the map and the size of the stickers. After multiple stickers were plotted, it was difficult to see the locations and areas under them.
Going forward I would prefer to mount the map on some sort of a cork base and pin the stickers on them.
Observations
- Common Patterns
Areas that students lived in, places that they most enjoyed visiting and the physical changes they observed in the city. - Contradictions
It was pretty apparent that the students had strong emotions about CMU, however, their experiences were all across the board. - Patterns based on specific demographics
Some of the patterns seen were very specific to how students experienced Pittsburgh. This points to the importance of visualizations changing based on demographics and communities. - The benefit of visualization specific people and contexts
I was able to capture how CMU students experience Pittsburgh which eventually drives their understanding of the city. Through this, the potential benefit of visualizations for specific people/contexts is beginning to emerge.
Next steps
For next steps, I will be focussing on the following things-
- How can I digitize and archive the content?
- How can this be an online tool or guide kit for different places and contexts?
