Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Maps are both an object and an action – a physical artifact, whether digital or analog, and a set of actions taken to produce the artifact. Yet it is the artifact which tends to dominant, a cultural tendency to think of maps for what they represent, instead of for what they do, both within the design fields and in the culture at large. Designers, including James Corner and Anuradha Mather and Dilip da Cunha, have described the ways that the map as an action can be a creative activity, revealing radically new readings of ecology, space and sociopolitical structures and thereby “staging the conditions for the emergence of new realities.” (Corner, 1999). According to this line of thinking, and similarly to iterative design, it is in the act of making itself, the active engagement through overlay, or juxtaposition, with objects, images, and data, that new insights are revealed. Perhaps then the question is not what do maps do, but whom do they do them for? A similar question can be asked about community engagement, which like maps has a doubly operative nature – it is both a stage of design, a product, and it is an action. What does engagement do, and for whom? The paper examines existing motives and methods for community engagement in the design fields, and draws on participatory art practices and theory to outline a more equitable approach to community outreach using mapping as a focus strategy.