Participatory cartography in design anthropology: maps and media for speculative futures

Currently Open Source digital cartographic approaches are shifting the role of map as document to map as participatory platform, one where environmental details and locational debates coincide. High resolution cameras and inexpensive sensing devices allow for the uploading of sensory details and environmental data. This paper illuminates how new technologies and Design Anthropology (Gunn, Otto, Smith 2013) add timely forms of debate, critique, and influential future imaginings to the “always speculative” map. Not only in visualising detail, but in the presentation of voice, there is a potential overturning of the silent non-speakers of the map and a potential break from a detrimental historical legacy inherited from direct ethnographic observation and the ‘human sciences’ (Whitehead 2012).