Locative media in the city: Drawing maps and telling stories

This chapter explores how users of locative media experience urban spaces through “cognitive maps” that they create. Rather than asking them to consider this in relation to predefi ned geographical maps, we wondered what it would be like if participants were asked to create their own maps, from scratch, of the city that they live in, and share their stories accordingly. As a mental process, cognitive maps consist of collecting, organizing, storing, recalling, and manipulating spatial information. With the help of those maps, our “ knowing is translated into telling ”—as Hayden White has put it—where experiences of places as well as memories are narrated. Within this process of representation and creating a self narrative of one’s everyday life through location information, a tool commonly used for identifying routes—the map—comes to be used as an interface, where users can create their own geotagged stories of their lives. Here, cognitive mapping is also defi ned as a storytelling platform, focusing on several examples of participant
maps of London. Used in this way, the method offers a fresh extension of
creative visual methods, in which people are invited to spend time applying their playful or creative attention to the act of making something, and then reflecting on it. The process offers insights into the lived experience of mediated life in a city that would otherwise be diffi cult to access.