Madison and Vicinity: A Tangible Map Quilt

The advanced cartography class at UW–Madison offers a deep dive into narrative & storytelling, aesthetics & design, and ethics & critique in cartography. In the fall semester of 2018, we added a sequence of four sketch mapping activities to this class to enable creative exploration as a warm-up to each technical lab assignment. Sketch mapping is a well-established research method in which participants translate their experiences, emotions, and memories of place into visual representations, with the resulting mental maps taking many possible, equally acceptable forms (Gieseking 2013; Kelly 2016). From a cartographic standpoint, sketch mapping is an important, formative stage in the design process for many practitioners, and arguably a cartographic skill in its own right, with early whiteboarding or wireframing enabling rapid brainstorming, collective discussion of alternatives, and development of storyboards and specification sheets to streamline subsequent design (Lloyd and Dykes 2011; Tyner 2014). As Tierney (2018, 45) writes, “even the roughest sketch is critical to getting into the creative mindset needed to begin a project before getting locked down in the software.”