anna carlsson-Reading Response

I find the most interesting and most important thing about mapping to be that it brings the design process closer to other professions and other professions closer to us. It could be a tool for architects and urban designers to collect, arrange and use the infinite amount of information we are surrounded by directly in the design. It also allows us to open our minds and look past our regular ways of entering the design process and might lead us to new interesting approaches and widen the idea of space.

I had some confusing experience of, what was then called mapping, once in a workshop but the Corner text made me realize that I might have been exposed to a part of what has given mapping a some of a bad reputation. The workshop was about what Corner describes in the chapter "Layering", dividing a project into layers and superimposing them to reach a "stratified amalgam of relationships amongst parts appears". In this workshop the technique was used mostly to create a visual experiment which reduced the theory to a visualizing tool. All the participants of the workshop ended up doing fancy patterns of historical maps and water and sewage systems, which I hope not is the purpose of it all.