Mapping is the act of representing land, space, or phenomena in visual form. In design, mapping is both tool of analysis and tool of imagination. Maps are never neutral; they decide what is visible and what layers of reality remain un-mapped or layers turned-off. Every line is political—borders, exclusions, naming. Cartography has been a weapon of colonialism as much as a method of science. But mapping is essential to design research and development. It is a way to test ideas, reveal hidden patterns, and create new worlds of meaning, but always with awareness of its political weight.
How do we represent territories whose histories, economies, and ecologies have been shaped by centuries of extraction, yet are still often perceived as peripheral or empty? 1. Introduction In his book Norrland, journalist Po Tidholm opens with a poem that captures a long-standing reality: northern Sweden has long been a site of resource extraction— iron […]
In December this year, the European Union’s Deforestation Regulation will start to apply to medium and large operators and traders. For micro and small enterprises, the same rules will apply next year. This means that if a commodity, such as cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soya, rubber, or wood, and products derived from those commodities, […]
Sara Eichner is a visual artist and designer with a keen interest in data visualisations and cartography. She works with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and programming languages like Python and uses design software to translate data into comprehensible visual stories. Her work is people-centred and she often uses data to represent less-heard voices. Eichner is […]
In the conversation with the landscape architecture professor, artist and writer Denise Hoffman Brandt, we speak about the morality issues attached to “doing good” while debunking Ian McHarg’s problematic position in Design with Nature. In the conversation, Brandt points out how our assumptions about nature shape our actions, why stewardship is problematic and what landscape […]
Günther Vogt probably needs no introduction in our profession; he has been an important practitioner for a couple of decades now, appreciated globally for his rich, non-linear and adventurous design approach. Initially, his education was more in the direction of botany. He later shifted to landscape architecture by studying in Rapperswil, Switzerland. After his study […]
Liam Young is together with Kate Davies running the Unknown Fields project. They travel around the world and explore landscapes behind objects we used on a daily basis: materials for our phones, fabrics for clothes, lithium for batteries … We caught Liam in Ljubljana, where he was narrating Unknown Fields film live.
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