Cultural Mapping

The cultural mapping project looks at the relationships between individuals and communities and how they locate, operate and flow through selected environments and public spaces. It utilises a number of creative methods and technologies to extend this discussion and provide a measure of its intrinsic benefits, lodged within a framework suitable for widespread use.

The Cultural Mapping Tool is one that we sometimes use in the run up to workshops, or in selected projects outside of the workshop environment. It is an application that also works alongside our RED software.

Each participant will be given a mobile phone probe. However, this is not like any normal mobile-phone. It has a very user friendly interface that will allow users to take photographs, video, write messages, record audio, mark on a sliding scale their emotions/opinions and answer questions that we send them.

The tools designed to be used as a way or harvesting information from large groups of people, very quickly, but most significantly, when they are in any given particular environment.

So you can imagine on a production line within a sweet manufacturing plant, for one day all their production staff using this probe. They are able to record bottle-necks, health and safety hazards, quality issues and their morale etc.

All this information is received back by Sandbox and can be presented to management on a single screen, all of the pictures, video, notes and answers/opinions. This is all information that could normally take a number of meetings, reports, facts, figures, consultants and ultimately time to collect.

We also see this tool as a method of surveying, for example, with tenants to a housing association or patients to a health service.