Sensory maps

Sensory maps depict the world as it is qualitatively experienced, drawing on alternative human sensory modalities to call attention to the more-than-visual sensory characteristics of place. Sensory maps combine aesthetics with empirically sensed datasets to both depict personal, temporally specified realities and to advocate the world as individually constructed. As such many sensory maps are exploratory and artistic in nature. Sensory mapping's roots can be traced to a historical desire to monitor changing urban environmental conditions and to navigational pragmatism. Historical practices that focus on sensed data have led to reforms in public hygiene, the quality of sonic environments, and human-scale urban planning that prioritizes diversity and well-being. Contemporary practitioners, concerned with the emotional, embodied, and affective aspects of cartography, utilize multiple sensory output media in addition to traditional paper and digital forms in order to draw attention to sensed, subjective characteristics and their relationship to place. Where sensory mapping has a pragmatic aim, urban psychogeographic mappings tend toward a political defamiliarization of known environments, drawing attention to emotional and affective powers of the natural, cultural and political. One prime hybrid example is Krygier's Guide Psychogéographique de OWU, the result of an improvised, multisensory project with young students.