Mapmaking in physical and digital space
Most of us can easily remember places we’ve been, even if we’ve only been there once or haven’t seen them for many years. We do this unconsciously through “cognitive mapping,” and specific features of the physical world help us make and use our maps. We don’t have the same facility with the digital spaces in which we spend so much of our time, like websites, applications, and operating systems, because they lack those specific features that help us make sense of and remember them.
This workshop will teach you how to turn digital experiences into intelligible, usable places, using techniques from wayfinding and cognitive geography. The first part of the workshop is tactical and focuses on the essential elements of placemaking and their traditional corollaries in digital design. The second part of the workshop expands the discussion of these elements to interrogate why they work and how we might develop new patterns.