Traveling and drawing everyday and everywhere

Maps tailor-made to the body of places.
Mapscapes, Landscape Drawings, Illustrated Maps.
Design strategies against the indifference of representation.

Product Design - Project and Theory

http://hdl.handle.net/10773/32991
This research upholds the Designer’s mediator role in the representation of places and drawing as its privileged tool. In this sense, we question if each place demands its own representation, maps ‘tailor made’ to the body of places. We have adopted a method of research through art and design. The different scopes of intervention and their implications have been mapped regularly through mind maps. Afterwards, design strategies have been applied, in the representation of places. The transferable knowledge to other authors/designers resides in demonstrating how to perform this contemporary process of mapping and representing of places, that is, how to draw. For this, four design strategies are proposed: Mapscapes, which focuses on the hybridity between cartographic code and observational drawing; Wayseeing Maps, which privileges walking as a way of getting to know places; WaySfindings Maps, which takes advantage of the inevitability of error in hand drawing; Tailor-Made Maps, dedicated to representing the uniqueness of place. As a result of the application of the four design strategies, sixteen maps of places were produced, destined for the artistic/academic, commercial, cultural and touristic context. The results were systematized in a table that relates the design strategies with the different ways of seeing each place. The table also allows differentiating the transferable knowledge of the authorship of each map. The final discussion is based on the possibility of creating new design strategies that can be transferred to other authors, but also and as in an open source, it addresses the possibility of others creating their own design strategies, for a differentiated representation of places.