This exercise was refreshing, and got me thinking about how much activity we miss in our routine transportation every day. We might say we know a neighborhood because we’ve lived there for six or seven years, as I have, but I discovered today new houses, trees, structures, and activities that took place just a couple blocks from me.
This exercise was also frustrating because I struggle with making my doodles look representative or at least pretty. So it was hard to capture the feeling (let along the nuances) of the neighborhood.
As with Melissa’s class, this psychographic map I think says as much or more about the observer that it does the area. There the experiences I didn’t sketch because they didn’t catch my eye as interesting, or were too difficult or time intensive to draw. And there were countless things I don’t know that I missed. And, like a game of telephone pictionary, someone looking at my map is going to imagine the walk differently too. This exercise did get me thinking about how maps often leave out the more experiential elements of a geography and got me thinking about how to incorporate those in our mapping project.