Mapping Water: Currents, Coastlines and Planetary Intelligence

SCI 6521 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Mapping has long been entangled with technologies of exploration, extraction, surveillance, territorial control, and the production of power. Yet maps have also been reclaimed by artists, activists, Indigenous communities, architects, designers, urbanists, technologists, and visionary thinkers as tools for counter-action, reparative agency, and world-making. Joining these efforts, this seminar explores water as a medium of planetary intelligence and hydro-commons.

In our day, intelligence is increasingly equated with AI, while ecological and social systems are increasingly constrained by institutional and data-driven boundaries. Designers and urbanists are urged once again to take leading roles in understanding and responding to the entanglements of the built environment across personal, collective, and planetary scales. Water sits at the core of such inquiry.

In this seminar, students develop practical skills alongside a vision of how geospatial technologies can diagnose overlooked relations and generate new forms of public engagement. Bodies of water and their margins—rivers, canals, watersheds, coastlines, seas, oceanic depths, and water infrastructures—serve as critical zones for researching extended geographies of urbanization.

We investigate geospatial technologies of mapping water as a data lineage: ancient and contemporary, physical and digital. Mapping becomes the place of interrogation, asking questions beyond representation: How maps are made, and who makes them? For whom are they made? What forms of information do they privilege? Which data collection methods, measurement protocols, materials, senses, and technoscientific processes are involved? How might designers intervene in their production?

Following water’s currents and places of flow, we design mapping strategies that make complex systems perceptible: revealing overlooked relationships, tracing anthropogenic change, and making situated stories and stakeholders visible. Practices from critical cartography, data activism, counter-mapping, thick mapping, participatory mapping, feminist geography, cyborg urbanism, and transcultural technologies of map-making enter the conversation, expanding what counts as geospatial and planetary intelligence.

Students design and develop mapping projects by combining map making, computation, key readings, archive visits, and hands-on exercises. Training moves between Geographic Information Systems (GIS), flow-field visualization, and Digital Elevation Modeling, alongside unconventional forms of data inquiry through human-computer interaction and physical making. Each student selects a body of water as the research ground for a final co-mapping project. Student work is evaluated through engagement with readings and discussions, experimentation across methods, and the conceptual and technical development of the final project. Prior GIS, P5.js, or TouchDesigner experience is favorable but not required.