On Mapping
Map making is both the representation and interpretation of a subjective reality experienced through your unique perspective. Though maps often allude to an objective depiction of space through measurement and time (e.g. the Cartesian grid, geographical surveys & co-ordinate systems), their potential as tools for design thinking exceeds the obvious.
Through the designer’s mind mapping can be understood as a subjective process of confronting reality through perception and imagination. It is an unlearning of preconceived notions and the discovery of new ways of thinking and seeing a particular place, which becomes more tangible and human than the geographical task of making a map.
This, I think, could happen through two approaches which begin at polar ends, but meet somewhere in between. The first and most noble is that you simply observe, without predilection or bias. You observe through a choice of sense / senses and with your observation you produce a calculated set of results that are methodically recorded and that do not pre-suppose an outcome. This method is scientific and the realisation of the data gathered becomes valuable by placing it against a hypothesis (which can be set either before or after the work begins).
The other approach is tainted and therefore, slightly more human. This method proposes an idea and seeks to prove / disprove it through creative engagement with the environment. This means that the mapping is a dialogue between the imagination and the lived through the act of engaging with both spheres simultaneously. Think about improvising artists, poets & writers. They’re usually working in this space. Their hypotheses do not happen only before the work begins or after it is done, but is constantly created and recreated as the work becomes.
It’s clear now that these approaches highlight that what we’re talking about are two fields of the brain, the left and the right. Whilst neither of them are isolated, some parts are more dominant than others and therefore, your approach to mapping will be uniquely your own. Both however require a datum of honesty. For the first method - this is easier; either the hypothesis is proven, or disproven or proposed from the data - to be investigated through subsequent research. In this instance, observations primarily make maps. For the second method, a relationship to how honest you’re being is measured by your intimacy to the context - the work has to be open to discussion and critique by people who know that place from a different perspectives. The work must become a dialogue and discussion and while it doesn’t produce a particular finding it might gather insights that allude to something greater than the making of a map.
Why then do we refer to mapping? For me, it is a tool that grounds the imagination to tonality and in four part harmony, lets it fly. Perhaps we could understand this as a search for the hidden axis, an other dimension (or related dimensions) of space, that transcends the obvious Cartesian understanding and discovers hidden patterns that interact with the known world and entice possibility.
