Cartography and the self

Finally, a meeting with the MapBox has come through, after many followups, I am hoping to meet them this weekend. 

But before I go up there armed with my set of questions, I decided to experiment with the idea of maps with my 6-year-old. I designed an activity, to map our home. My intention was to ascertain how a child relates to her living space, how she navigates it and most importantly how much of this navigation is visual memory. 

Activity - 

• Draw a map of the rooms in your home. 
• Include walls, windows, doors and the primary piece of furniture. 
• Build on various parts of the house using the map.
• Try to position the doors, windows, and furniture with accuracy. 
• Label various parts of the map.

Follow-up - 

• Expand the map to include the neighborhood and streets. 
• To be able to place the position of our house as a part of a larger neighborhood. 
• Locate and explore neighborhood armed with a hand-drawn map. 

I believe that mapping one's surroundings are not just a lesson in geography, but also an art project that will help with some exploring of the neighborhood. 

The map-making process was extremely fun! I could see her little mind envisioning spaces, like the distance between a cupboard and a bed, the location of a dustbin, etc. Each time she was jogging her visual memory with almost no help from me. 

What I saw - 

1. When in doubt she kept repositioning her physical body to align with the view she was drawing.
2. She would sprint off to check the accurate position of things. 
3. She was always conscious of the routes she takes to access various parts of the house and even had shortcuts to access few areas! 
4. There was an innate sense of space that she had build with her surroundings.   

I was surprised at how she explained her process of envisioning her map. Watch the video here. 

This activity for me made me think of a recent event. In a taxi recently my driver was clueless about routes through the central part of the city. To his rescue, he had google maps on his handset (I checked if he was from the city, and he confirmed that he has lived here all his life!) I am now stuck with a new set of questions - 

1. In the new world as we navigate, are we replacing the visual memory of places, buildings, trees or shops with 2D maps of a place, and in doing so are we discrediting the visual ability of the mind? 

2. Does this sort of dependency alter our relationship with places? The visual memory of a place is something like what Uttara describes in her video, a photo in her mind. This visual memory is such a tacit advantage!  

3. If we stop taking ‘mental pictures’ how will we recall this memory at a later point in time? 

   4) Is the ease with which we use technology to navigate, changing the way we relate to our surroundings?

All these questions bring me back to the core area of my study - What makes a good map for a child. Does a good map transcend navigation and help create relationships with places. 

If yes, then shouldn't we all be making maps that work for each of us.  

Here is how the map looked by the end of 1 .5 hours!