Milgram talks a lot about how a person’s experiences can change how they view their environment. As a study, Milgram asked Parisians to draw maps of Paris. In their own unique way every map was different; each person’s experiences, social perceptions, history, socioeconomic standing, etc… influenced their ability to make an accurate map of Paris. However, in the end this study wasn’t one looking for accuracy, Milgram was after people’s “mental maps” he wanted to understand how people could convey an indirect representation of space and experiences visually. After reading Milgram’s “Psychological Maps of Paris”, we were assigned a task similar to Milgram’s maps.
I was partnered up with Dylan Zack. Dylan told me about her home town, Portland. The first thing she told me about was the Willamette River and the 7 bridges that cross it. The Willamette was the center of Portland, running the entire length of the city. The next place Dylan described to me was downtown Portland. It was immediately obvious to me this was a place Dylan spent a lot of time, she had so much to say and was really passionate when she talked. She told me about Stump Coffee House, her favorite local coffee shop, saying “its Portland’s local version of Starbucks only so much better!” She went on to tell me about her favorite local boutique downtown, Back Talk. On my map I made Back Talk very large on the map because this was a place that was really important to Dylan. She explained to me that the owner of this local boutique attended Parsons, she was an inspiration to Dylan and influenced her to attend Parsons as well. Dylan also told me about her adventures downtown at the Portland Art Museum, her high school, and her job at American Apparel. She then moved on to telling me about where she lived in an area called North Portland. Dylan then told me about her home on Mississippi St and about her best friend lived only a couple blocks away.
After Dylan told me about the basics of her town and the major geographic locations, she began to tell me about each neighborhood. She stated with West Hills. On the on the South East side of Portland the West Hills is full of gated communities and millionaires. She described the people that lived there as “bougie and rude”, it was easy to see that Dylan wasn’t a huge fan of the people in that part of town. Next, she talked about an area called Division, this was Dylan’s old neighborhood. Dylan seem sad when she talked about this area she told me “It’s so different now, it’s all tourists and so busy.” After telling me about a few other neighborhoods; North Portland, St Johns, and Below the MLK, Dylan realized there was a huge area in Portland that she didn’t know anything about. She didn’t know the name of the neighborhood or what was there so we ended up giving the neighborhood a new name on Dylan’s map. We called this neighborhood IDK because from Dylan’s view of her home town this place had almost no significance.
The final places I added to Dylan’s map was the places she would go for fun. She talked a lot about these places because of the many memories associated with them. She told me about going to Sauvies island in the fall to see pumpkin patches and in the summer for a day trip to the beach. She talked about getting for from Elephants Deli, and taking it for a picnic in the rose gardens. She also told me about the Hawthorne Docks, explaining that that was her go to spot in the summer to swim and hang out with friends. After all this we had finished Dylan’s map.
The final step in the project was for me to take what Dylan had told me and make a visual map out of it. I made the map in Photoshop basically just transferring what I had written on the paper to a digital medium. After completing the assignment, the relation to Milgram’s study was obvious. People are directly influenced by their surrounding and experiences. If a person has a memory associated with a place the way they speak of it becomes passionate and thorough. Alternatively, when someone talks about a place with less memories associated with the place becomes dull and generalized. Dylan’s map was far from an accurate geographical map of Portland but, in her own way it developed into a map of her mind, detailing her memories and experiences in the place she calls home.
