Materiality and the activity of mapping

The notion of co-production of a natural resource catalogue involves a collective activity applied across the process of map making and the interaction of the participants with material-based agency.

In our experience as researchers and practitioners we have seen that co-creation practices requires to use the design process as a means to enable a wide range of activities for different stakeholders in order to collaborate (Burns et al. 2006). We needed to change our researcher’s perspective of the participant roles in the map-making exercise. We transformed the people from the community from passive objects of study to active and willing collaborators that need to acquire certain spatial skills for knowledge production working with an expert group of researchers. Our end goal was to bring knowledge from theory into practice in a way that understands the technology of mapping as well as respecting local knowledge.

Mapping is a collective activity where participant’s roles get mixed. The person who eventually is going to use the map is given the position of being the “expert of his/her experience” and plays a larger role in overall knowledge development. Evidence for this statement happened during a particular trial in Desierto de los Leones National Park with Mr. Juan Esparza, one of the community leaders of San Mateo Tlaltenago. At one point of the trial Mr. Esparza stopped in an open valley to explain our location and other important issues in the territory, he grabbed a stick and started eloquently to explain by drawing with it in the ground. That moment was crucial evidence that Mr. Esparza had vast and critical spatial knowledge of the landscape and location of natural resources in his territory.

Mr. Esparza’s explanation reminded me of a story Bruno Latour (2003) uses in his book “Science in Action” to analyse how specific inventions like cartography, helped people to construct facts for an argument. Latour’s focuses specifically on how someone persuades someone else to take a statement. To illustrate his point, he refers to La Pérouse travels through the Pacific, for Louis XVI in 1788, with the specific mission of bringing new knowledge to their civilization. Landing in a particular place he encounters aborigines, to his surprise they show him they understood geography quite well, by answering La Pérouse question of where they are, they draw a map of the island on the sand with the scale and details needed by Pérouse to understand. Another, who is younger, sees that the rising tide will soon erase the map and picks one of the explorer’s notebooks and draw the map again in pencil.

Latour questions the difference between the ‘savage geography’ and the ‘civilized’ or ‘scientific mind.’ Both actors in this encounter are able to think in terms of a map and navigation, strictly speaking they both have the ability to draw and visualize based on the same principle of projection, first on the sand and then on paper. What he tries to explain in his example is that knowledge is relative, if we analyse the situation closely, the purpose of that drawing changes for each of the persons that generates it. From the side of the aborigine, and in our case from Mr. Esparza, there is no doubt that he and his team know their territory quite well, there is no problem if the drawing fades away, it can be redrawn at any time. In the contrary for La Pérouse or our research team’s perspective: the drawing represents a core part of the mission, we need to be able to establish document and pass the location of those places and species and bring them back to people who expect certain documentation. These people expect ‘a map’ as evidence to determine the contents and locations of this part of the world and if it is worth another visit for claiming new natural resources for their future interests and exploitation. La Pérouse and our team’s exclusive interest in this representation relies on some specific attributes that let us incorporate it as projection, writing, archiving and or computing. This capacity somehow needs to hold and endure the journey back to the place where people await that information. The critical information needs to be stored for later use and discourse. Our team and La Pérouse interests “hold on” to a long tradition of knowledge and practice that has been constructed through manipulation of paper, prints and images accumulated through our own culture.

According to Latour the difference between us as researchers and Mr. Esparza’s team as actors in this situation is in the strategy, in the power provided by the semiotic material which is inscribed in the object we call a map, how is it that this particular inscription results in something convincing. In other words, Latour focuses on the mechanism used by the artefact to sum up “groups of allies”.

Thinking about our project aim, we needed to come up with useful tools for the community in the process of mapping and understand their familiar inscriptions and materials that would facilitate their creative activity. In sum, we needed to invent objects, which have the properties of being mobile, but also immutable, presentable, readable and combinable with one another. (Latour, 1986 p. 21) From our participant’s perspective, we needed them to be able to translate their local knowledge and memories related to their natural resources through conversation and pour them directly onto a collective map, we needed to think maps as “immutable mobiles”.

Concept of inscription in Design

The concept of inscription is crucial for the design activity because any designer aims to create, modify, enable and or constrain some capacities of action through the designed artefact. Akrich (1991) explains the notion of inscription as: a vision, value, program of action, or prediction about the world that the designer ascribes in the technical content of a new object.

The strength of an inscription may vary from being very strong, that is, imposing on a particular inflexible program of action, to the very weak, offering many flexible programs of action, according to Kocaballi. Strong inscriptions belong to a design perspective of design that aims to predict, prescribe and control the kind of relations between humans and technologies and the ways in which their interaction unfolds.

By letting a few groups of specialists control the technology and resources in the process of map-making of a community instead of facilitating it, we are characterizing the human-technology interaction shaped by strong inscriptions in that situation. This is not suitable in situations where we need appropriation, personalization and adaptation or when exploration is needed. Participatory mapping is a process that does not benefit from the assumptions of agency as predictable and fully controllable phenomenon. On the contrary, to acknowledge and develop sensitivities to manage relationally for designing new technologies of mapping we must formulate design solutions that can deal with the unexpected situations in the various cases of participatory mapping that inevitably arise.

Co-creative approach and generative tools for the mapping activity – The generative tool kit to support the participatory mapping workshops with the communities had the following components:

• A visual presentation explaining the objective of the catalogue, maps and activities involved in the workshop
• A base map that could be a satellite image or a topographic layout of the community
• Translucent or clear paper to overlay the base map, Post-it notes and colour labels with different shapes.
• Photographic images of relevant species and places that we found during the trials (plants, trees, springs, places, animals and short video recordings.
• Glue and Velcro tape, small wood cubes, color markers and cards
• The observational guidebook was a follow-up activity for potential participants after the workshop.

For the purpose of explaining our methodology, we are considering all the components of the toolkit mentioned above as mediating devices that influence the individual experience of the participants in the mapping activity. This focus on artefacts is borrowed from activity theorist Wartofsky, who describes an artefact as being useful for creative thinking. He emphasizes the activity of representing with a purpose, that human beings create their own means cognition, signalling the existence of tertiary artefacts which “transcends the more immediate necessities of productive praxis,” giving freer rein to imagining “possible worlds” (Wartofsky 1979). And such possible worlds function as models, embodiments of purpose and at the same time instruments for carrying out such purposes. Based on this, we argue that all the maps generated by each of the collectives in the workshops, specify future object-oriented activities. They serve far beyond their immediate environment, propelled by the creative activity of the collective group.

Co-creative approaches to solve complex problems and identified future opportunities do not belong to a particularly discipline or domain. In fact, very similar approaches exist under the umbrella of Participatory Design that combine the expertise of designers and researchers and the situated expertise of the people whose work is to be impacted by a change. All these approaches are currently in use by academics, designers, international development and social the sciences. (Sanders and Stappers 2012)

Generative design approaches empower everyday people to generate and promote alternatives to their current situation and is based on the motto: “all people are creative”. The name “generative tools” refers to the creation of a shared language that researchers and other stakeholders use to communicate visually and directly with each other. The design language is generative in the sense that with it, people can express an infinite number of ideas through a limited set of stimuli. The generative tools approach in our case aims to provide simple and tangible materials to help participants communicate knowledge and memories linked to their natural resources through the exercise of mapping. We looked for inexpensive materials that required no professional or special verbal skills, low spatial expertise, and low effort to construct a tangible artefact.

The selection of the materials, colours and icons should encourage the expression and reflection of past memories and previous experiences. They should be designed to facilitate the process of participation of people unfamiliar with your goals. Participants select materials, point, draw colour and build artefacts and explain to others what relevant information they are aware of. These individual artefact creating activities are a way of harvesting a collective wisdom into a layered and integrated whole.

The Generative Design (GD) approach as well as Agency Sensitive Design (ASD), are two approaches that helped us to develop and design the tools in our sessions. We see many parallel principles between the two approaches for ideation and expression for the mapping exercise. GD sees generative tools as a methodology within design research, focusing on materials or objects of creation for non-designers, through a shared design language that researchers use to visually communicate between the parties involved in a project. With these material objects, people generate and promote alternatives to their current situation and allow people to express their visions, wishes and expectations about the future.

ASD, in comparison, supports a relational nature of human agency (Kocaballi et al. 2011) where agency is neither an attribute of the subjects nor the objects, but an ongoing reconfiguration of the world and ultimately an effect of a heterogeneous network of human and non-human actors. (Latour 2005). These new approach to the concepts of agency has been very helpful for projects that need to rethink how technology (e.g. artefacts, tools, objects or things in general) interacts with human intentions and social structures. We argue that this approach is complementary to the participatory perspective. Instead of trying to control, predict or design actions and relations for the user, designers may look for more emergent and fluid relations in the situation they envision. Kocaballi (2012) sets out six different qualities: Relationality, Visibility, Multiplicity, Accountability, Duality and Configurability. The majority of these qualities are relevant in creating conceptual lenses for designers to gain a relational understanding of a situation and increase their awareness to accommodate the diversity and richness of human agency and to perform a more responsible and ethical design practice.

Both approaches need to promote alternatives to a specific current situation based on the notion that all people are creative and have knowledge, they become “experts of the experience”. They value the local expertise of the people who inhabit the environment and challenge the existing power structures that exist between dominant organizations.

One mapping session was held for each community through the period of March until May of 2017. The collection of tools the participants used were planned as a common language to lead the participants through conversations where they could communicate their stories, feelings and ideas while constructing the map of their territory. One of the greatest strengths of this initiate relied on the ability to bring mapping process to community members and share together ideas and visions, which can contribute to building community cohesion (Alcorn, 2000). We will use GD and ASD framework to explain some components of the mapping exercise.

Relationally – The quality of relationally refers to the connectedness and relatedness of human and non-human actors or socio-material arrangements where they co-constitute each other through their interactions.

To reconcile the relational character of our capacities for actions, the constructed nature of subjects and objects and the corporeal grounds of knowing an action, we designed the activities and materials for the sessions considering three sensitivities:

1. Understanding of mutual influence, shaping and co-constitution of actors and artefacts.
2. Embracing and supporting emergent and improvised actions.
3. Consider the mapping activity as an assemblage of actors, artefacts and collective hybrids.

For example, the images used for each session were collected from the trials with each community and they represented local places familiar for them, each session was conducted with the same structure but with small differences. In the Santa Fe’s session, participants were more used to mobile technology and wanted to incorporate their own images for their maps, so we marked that with posit it notes, and then asked them to send them so we could incorporate them in final maps. We did not make a specific sample criterion for participants but encouraged elders as well as women. In one of the workshops, children were brought to the sessions and we were happy to work with all of them.

From all the generative materials for mapping we should like to stress that the printed photographs and iconography taken from their own environment, helped the flow of actions for all the participants by supporting emergent and improvised actions (Figure 1). The easy manipulation inscribed in simple objects enabled each participant to pick an image and attach it to the map, by doing so they could easily describe memories and stories related to their natural resources or express their concerns that threaten their environment.

Figure 1. A group of participants working with materials to build their map at Chimalpa’s Workshop. Nora Morales. Photograph © Nora Morales.

Visibility – The quality of visibility is closely related to qualities like multiplicity and accountability. It involves making visible invisible work, human and non-human actors, infrastructure and interaction during the mapping activity. Visibility not only facilitates the overall awareness of human actors of themselves and others, but also helps the performance of more responsible practices.

This quality was very important to support user appropriation by making resources publicly available. The observation guidebook (Figure 2) given to some participants after the mapping activity is a great example of the quality of visibility, it allowed the people that participated in the workshops to continue collecting information related to their memories and activities linked to natural resources. In some cases, it was given to some neighbours and allowed us to combine more information and integrate more participant knowledge into the project. The layout was designed following a rough sketch style, with a lot of white space encouraging the participants to fill in the space in a more creative way, by pasting their own personal images. In one of the cases a woman showed her family tradition of recollecting mushrooms “hongeros” by placing pictures from their family album and imprinting a detail inscription regarding each mushroom type and classification.

Figure 2. Observational guidebook from a participant from Chimalpa using family pictures to describe different types of mushroom and activities related to their recollection. Photograph © Nora Morales.

Multiplicity – This quality refers to multiplicity in ways of knowing and representing, which entail participation and heterogeneous sources of influence in the mapping process. In the workshop we had to overcome the traditional dichotomy of scientific/indigenous, expert/layman, men/women embrace knowledge diversity rather than our own traditions focusing on hierarchies.

We established mixed teams of participants and some of the elders couldn’t write or read, so each team freely developed roles some of the participants acted as tellers, and others as writers. We also distributed a set of categories that we encouraged to be broken into different classification systems of their resources. There was an instance initiated by a female participant in one of the teams in Chimalpa, who tried to explain what she thought were root causes regarding their natural resource’s issues using the “4 element classification of nature” (Water, Air, Fire and Earth) from ancient Greece. For example, she ascribed the problem of air pollution under the element of Air, and linked to various causes: burning trash, automobile pollution, lack of ecological culture, garbage in the streets, and animal waste. Those were common practices and situations from the inhabitants of the community. This enunciation later provided fertile ground to develop solutions they could implement.

This example is evidence of how the quality of the mapping activity was able to engage the group in the making of a rich map, describing themselves and their particular forms of practice. It also helped them explain to us the complex relations and incorporated multiple points of view of how they see their natural resources.

Accountability – Organized action can be observable and reportable. The materials and activities of the mapping session provided the participants with information about their own activities by dividing them in four or five groups (depending on the number of assistants). When finished, we asked them to explain their work to other groups in a plenary session. The participants were required to relate their position and perspective from other actors taking responsibility for their own perspective and partial knowledge.

Duality – Our designs invite particular kinds of actions, while inhibiting certain others (Latour 2005). This quality is strongly related to the idea of inscription of values into an object or technology. By using the kind of iconography with a “sketchy look” for the maps and the guidebook and the use of paper and tactile materials for the workshops we engaged regular people like woman and children who are more familiar with crafting activities. An important gender note: by prioritizing crafting technics, we de prioritized the formality around written and oral speech that is usually ascribed to male dominant formats. Men in these contexts are usually the ones acting as local leaders, acting as “commissioners of the commons,” especially when they negotiate with government delegations.

Configurability – The design process does not stop after the map production phase but the actual use of the map for the community, so our research team also developed a continuous organization of activities with the community to continue the integration process of information between technology and human actors transforming the data we collected into useful knowledge they could use. That is why the observational guidebook was key to the interaction with participants for the community from which we had very good results. We also are planning an open structure for the platform that will let participants continue adding information from their terrain of natural resources on an on-going basis, just like the mapping project.

After the workshop with each community each team generated a collage-map with the type of evidence that we were interested to connect with spatial data, which relates more to community memories and their shared understanding of the problems as well as local knowledge linked to their natural resources. This type of information is usually avoided in formal cartographic scientific maps.