I recently led a session at Wherecamp entitled “Maps and Play: Effective Maps for Social and Strategic Spaces.” We had a great conversation and I thought I’d post some of the notes here publicly.

The key observation that led me to hold this session was that the emerging metaphor for interacting with location-based services has been the list, not the map. I think that more stripped-down formats have prevailed because Google-style maps are not suited for the non-geographic spaces that games and social tools inhabit.

I think that this doesn’t have to be the case. The capabilities of maps to display rich, deep visual and spatial relationships is unparalleled. But maybe we need to rethink what effective maps for communicating non-geographic spaces might look like, and talk about how to build these maps.

This five minute presentation set the context for the conversation.

In attendance and contributing:

• sally(.com)
• Jeff Warren (http://unterbahn.com/)
• Tim Vetter
• Dylan Phillips (http://mykoan.spaces.live.com/)
• Alex Chaucer
• Many more…let me know if I’ve missed you!

We started out the conversation throwing back and forth some examples of maps of non-geographic spaces:

• Conceptual maps (diagrams) explain the flow of thought
• The collected items of a character in an RPG collectively trace the path that that character took through the game
• “The Sims” dollhouse maps as really being about relationships with the Sims, not so much the geography of the house
• The game “go” as a self-referential map that represents the state of play — squint and you’ll see the power relationships, as in a good infographic
• Jeff brought up this incredible image of the medieval Ebstorf map which projects a physical representation of the town of Ebstorf around a spiritual conception of Christ’s body.
• WWII ‘flight maps’ which showed ground detail only along the trajectory of a planned flight.

And the meaning of the act of creating a map:

• Maps as placemaking, creating a place (how people form a mental model of new locations)
• Audio for exploration, how do blind people form maps of their spaces?
• The act of taking traces with you (as in the RPG example, or Katamari Damacy)

New spaces for us to explore:

• “Brand space” — checking into a movie, sports team, Starbucks
• “Food space” — a la foodspotting.com

And some challenges:

• What are the cultural differences in cognition? Men vs. women. Dyslexics have trouble reading maps.
• The differences between a map of home versus a foreign space: something known versus something unknown.
• How the ideal map for a space might melt and morph as your familiarization with the space progresses: thinking of a map as the spatial relationship of names, not necessarily geographic features.

It was really great to delve into the possibility space around this discussion with enthusiastic people who have the same issues in mind. Dylan set up a Google Group to continue the conversation — I look forward to passing notes back and forth.