What is a map?

A map is a question together with its answer.

An accurate map answers the question correctly. A useful map asks a question that interests you. I know of many accurate useless maps.

Why is that so often my experience?

A map intends to tell us where something is in space. It ends up telling us what the mapmaker is able to perceive in that space. In fact, it limits itself to telling us what the mapmaker considers to be priority data within what they perceive.

So, you wouldn’t find a street map that indicates that this street corner smells like jasmine flowers and sounds like a room full of sewing machines.

Why? Because, obviously the mapmaker was not fortunate enough to experience this space as would someone who is blind. They didn’t realize that – as any blind person would have perceived – you need to turn left here and go twelve paces to find the door to your tailor who, by the way, hires seven assistants to sew fashions all day long and has planter boxes of jasmine outside the open windows on either side of her door.

As a researcher in the area of tourism and disability I start with a fundamental observation: Disability is not entirely determined by whether I can walk or see or hear. Disability is a social judgment placed upon those facts about me. A society’s attitude toward human difference is, speaking metaphorically now, a “map” for how to allocate resources in relation to human beings.

To play with the metaphor, disability is a social construction that places me on the margins of social participation – at the edges of or outside the map - by undervaluing me as a human being and as a citizen.

Thus undervalued as a person, I and those like me, are apportioned a smaller piece of our shared social resources by this prejudiced calculus.

So before we even begin to read any specific map we know that a map is most often somebody else’s questions. It is shaped from somebody else’s perceptions. These may or may or may not be accurate in fact or relevant to our interests. In fact, what we have come to call a map may not be capable of expressing the sort of information we need in order to navigate such as sound or smell.

All the way in the back of the room can you hear Paulo Freire whispering in my ear that learning to read a map can be as politically liberating as learning to read the alphabet?

I wonder if Paulo would lead us to a question. Is the fact that my people find so many maps to be useless related to the fact that people with disabilities are not those who typically make maps? Can we change that?

They say that the secret to good research is forming the right question. Let’s play with Google Maps to see if we can figure out the questions being asked there.

I have chosen five maps centering on Guanabara Bay.

This first map is actually incomplete. It is a map-in-progress. There are two blue balloons visible here. What question might have been in the mind of the mapmaker that caused them to put these two marks on the map?

Right, they want to say something about the relationship between these two locations.

The second map shows what? It shows a major automobile route from Rio to Niteroi. Specifically, it starts at the yacht Club in Botafogo and ends at the yacht club south of Niteroi.

The third map shows a relationship between the Botafogo yacht club and the one in Niteroi if one travels via public transit.

The fourth is how a sailor might go from one yacht club to another.

Each map requires different information to successfully answer the question it asks.

Take a close look at the fifth map. Do you see that it has the same start and end points? Yet it shows a path that goes far past Petropolis up toward Juiz de Fora before it comes back down to Niteroi. Can anyone guess what question Google Maps thinks it is answering with this map?

The map was generated by asking, “How can I walk from Point A to Point B?” The answer is a 415 kilometer trek that takes an estimated 88 hours!

OK, so now we know that technology itself, Google Maps for example, is not sufficient to make accurate and useful maps for persons with disabilities.

This neglect has created an opportunity for Eduardo Battiston to win an award from Google. He will supplement Google’s map of Sao Paulo with Accessibility View. “Accessibility View,” explain my friends at Universal Design.com, “will provide … photographs of sidewalks from the perspective of a wheelchair user, allowing viewers to identify any potential obstacles along the route, like a lack of curb cuts or a hill that is too steep.”

Eduardo has not yet shown his perspective from a wheelchair view but here is an example of a free tool that captures existing Google Map data from the point of view of an automobile.

HyperLapsehttp://vimeo.com/63653873

Eduardo is far from the only person trying to resolve this problem of sidewalk navigation.

Several years ago I was visited by two Hungarians who went on to create the mobile application for self-guided walking tours called Pocket Guide. We worked on learning to perceive data - how to capture the information necessary to be certain that their walking tours accommodated people with disabilities.

One academic paper on this subject of sidewalk navigation was recently sent to me by one of its authors, Benedict Jones.

When Benedict heard I would be speaking to you he sent his paper called “Enhancing Wheelchair Mobility through Capture and Use of Terrain Data.” In the paper the authors make a start at elaborating protocols for data capture and publication. What I find particularly relevant is the author’s approach to rating systems for the routes suggested by an application. This approach corresponds to the consensus reached by those of us who consult in the field:

Expert opinion based on reliable data should be supplemented by the more democratic multiple user contributions on the same data and routes. This catches the biases of experts, the factual errors when inputting or outputting the data, and any changes that may have occurred since the experts did their measurements.

It also acknowledges that a map is best at representing discrete data points and their relationships but not the ‘atmosphere’ of a space. For a fascinating application of the concept of atmospheres I highly recommend the work of my colleagues Regina Cohen, Cristiane Rose Duarte and Alice Brasileiro in their paper, “Inclusion and Accessibility of Persons with Disability in Brazil: Senses and Sensations in the Access to Patrimonial Historical Museums in the State of Rio de Janeiro.”

This robust attention to user experience is fundamental to the design process known as Universal Design. Universal Design must be the process used to create any reliable map made for people with disabilities. This is because the map itself must not be seen as ‘special” and thus stigmatizing and because such a map is inevitably also useful to those without disabilities. The Institute for Human Centered Design defines the concept this way:

Universal Design is a framework for the design of places, things, information, communication and policy to be usable by the widest range of people operating in the widest range of situations without special or separate design. Most simply, Universal Design is human-centered design of everything with everyone in mind.

Universal Design is also called Inclusive Design, Design-for-All and Lifespan Design. It is not a design style but an orientation to any design process that starts with a responsibility to the experience of the user.

So far we are mainly talking about gathering data. What about effectively communicating that data? That exploration tells us that we need to reinvent mapmaking.

I want to start this part of the conversation by emphasizing the contributions of a person with a disability. He is Dr. Joshua Meile of Berkeley California..

Josh has created what is called a tactile map of the entire San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit system. Its raised lines of plastic are supplemented with Braille labels. You may have seen this sort of relief map as near as the Jardim Botanico here in Rio. The innovation he has introduced involves yet one more sense – hearing. Key points on the map may be touched with an audio smart pen triggering recorded verbal information.

The raised lines on Josh’s transit system map are static and fixed. Another laboratory is working on what is called a haptic display. Here tiny pins in the device can be raised and lowered in response to computer commands. You may have seen a haptic display as a narrow extra keyboard sitting in front of a blind person’s laptop. Rather than see words on the screen these refreshable Braille displays pop up pins that can be read as words with the fingers. Haptic displays under development can be used to make refreshable tactile maps.

Recall the video we saw earlier with Google’s images of roads and Eduardo Battiston’s idea foe Accessibility View with images of sidewalks Josh worked on the Descriptive Video Exchange. It is a crowd-sourced image description service that immediately became popular. It is already being used worldwide to audiodescribe

online versions of films. It can be used to audiodescribe any video used in online maps.

Pietr Human in South Africa has been sharing with me his progress with accessible maps using a different approach. His map, called InCar, geolocates the automobile using the system and alerts travelers to upcoming points of interest like an automated tour guide. The system offers detailed verbal descriptions of the beauty and history through which one is driving. From the beginning, when we met in Johannesburg in 2009, Pietr’s central goal has been to make this product an accessible map. He calls it the “World’s First GPS Tourism Audio Visual Destination Finder. He explains, “The audio-visual presentations provide passengers and kids a fun and meaningful “on the road” pastime. For the first time, people with SPECIAL NEEDS, Paraplegics, Deaf/Hard-of Hearing and the Blind are being included with accessibility information that matters to them.”

Closer to my home in California, near Apple and Google, Joana Cardosa from Portugal and her partner Shannon Moore are launching an online environment that will be the perfect setting for sidewalk visualizations such as Accessibility View. They describe their project, Effortless City, as a sidewalk navigation system where carefully gathered data relevant to wheelchair users is presented in visually appealing an user-sensitive ways. In fact, the site contains an artificial intelligence algorithm that processes data and packages it into suggestions for accessible routes customized to each user.

Technologies are advancing that allow for the reinvention of maps – texture, sound, static and moving images can now easily be incorporated in maps. The maps themselves can know where they are with GPS signals and know who they are talking to with artificial intelligence algorithms.

Regardless of the inspiring technology maps will continue to represent the perspectives of mapmakers.

So, as the next generation contribution to accessible maps I suggest something that only Brazil can do right now. Leverage the 2016 Paralympics. Include a map-reading and map-literacy project of conscientizacao in the Rio 2016 Games Cultural Olimpiad. I would be happy to be part of a team that does so.

We can be certain that directories, maps, and awareness campaigns will be launched for tourists and citizens alike showing the glorious places one can experience in Brazil before, during, and after Rio 2016.

What if we made a map whose purpose is exactly the opposite? What if we made a map that highlights everywhere in Rio that simply is not available to the direct experience of someone in a wheelchair?

It would serve as a public education about the experience of physical exclusion in Rio. It would also serve the starting point for an action plan for the city to expand its accessibility.

To be trustworthy, relevant, and legible it would need to respect its readers.

It would need to be auditory and tactile for the blind. It would need to be both verbal and iconic to accommodate those literate in Portuguese and those who are not. It would need to be visual to accommodate the sighted. It would be literal with image-described photos and videos for those whose learning style was highly sight-based but still accessible to those who are not. It would be increasingly abstract using diagrams, sketches, icons, and spatial relationships for those whose learning style favored the abstract. It would be timely by indicating where accessibility projects were planned or underway. It would be starkly barren where physical inaccessibility made spaces unknowable to cadeirantes through direct experience.

It would be art imitating through a new kind of “map” something of the atmosphere that exclusion infuses in a place.

Perhaps we could call it a Map of Saudades. It would be an artistic representation of the sense of the “presence of absence” that people with disabilities sense but do not always articulate in relation to spaces which they are prohibited from experiencing firsthand.

END***

Notes:

Definition of Universal Designhttp://humancentereddesign.org/universal-design

Pietr Humanhttp://incar.co.za/

Effortless Cityhttps://www.facebook.com/EffortlessCityhttp://effortlesscity.wordpress.com/

We want to start from assumptions that are positively biased toward users with disabilities – mapmaking that is inclusive. We can find clues toward that in the writing of the Australian quadriplegic professor Simon Darcy. He wrote on how to present accessibility data to travelers with disabilities. Darcy notes that including photos, videos, diagrams, and icons supplemented with actual measurements greatly aids the travel decision-making process for travelers with disabilities. (A METHODOLOGY FOR TESTING ACCESSIBLE ACCOMMODATIONINFORMATION PROVISION FORMATS) As we noted so does taking advantage of the democratizing influence of crowd-sourced ratings.

HyperLapsehttp://www.teehanlax.com/labs/hyperlapse/

Pietr Humanhttp://incar.co.za/

Effortless Cityhttps://www.facebook.com/EffortlessCityhttp://effortlesscity.wordpress.com/

Napolean Maphttp://lindsayrgwatt.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/minard.jpg

http://dougmccune.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/napoleon_pumpkin_1.jpg

http://research.bllly.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/minards-napoleon.png

http://www.wayfind.com/images/napoleonBoykinFull.jpg