IAP Course: Mapping as Making

I’m teaching a fun, experimental two-week workshop this IAP in which we’ll experiment with mapping, treated as a design process. Description is below. The course runs January 11-22.

This workshop will introduce students to principles and practices of map design – what Europeans have called cartography - using both desktop and web-based graphic design and mapping tools. Through hands-on tutorials and case studies, students will be equipped to design compelling maps that tell powerful stories.

Maps are one of the most widely-used visual tools of activists, urban planners, and designers. Whether relaying the results of a GIS analysis, agitating for systemic change, providing the analytical basis for a plan, sharing the results of scientific inquiry, or actively gathering data as part of a participatory or crowd-sourced process, maps are ubiquitous. This ubiquity, however, makes us forget that maps are expected to do quite a lot of work – to capture and hold attention, to get us from place to place, to make arguments, to tell stories, to propose interventions. We will be learning to do each of these things better, and to do each of these things differently. Some GIS experience is preferred, though not required.