Maps are Designed Things!

Maps are perhaps 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.