Harriet Hand || Stirring Up New Ideas: Unreliable Mapmaking || Watershed
Channel: Watershed
Date: 20/01/2023

Stirring Up New Ideas is a current PhD project that explores the ways mapmaking might activate the kind of thinking that generates new possibilities, transforming young people’s sense of self and of the world around them. During March and April 2022, Harriet Hand worked with a group of local 17-year-olds in Watershed’s Studio 5 where speculative experiments in mapmaking filled the space sparking unanticipated shifts in young people’s personal and collective sense of their everyday. This talk will share something of what emerged in the space and reflect on the potential of the unreliableness of mapmaking.

Speaker - Harriet Hand

Harriet Hand is a designer, educator and researcher with a background in the field of wayfinding design. Working with Bristol-based City ID she has extensive experience working with cities to improve people’s experience of moving to, through and around diverse urban environments. An interest in creative thinking as an everyday practice drew her towards education and, through her practice as a secondary and higher education teacher, she has explored mapmaking techniques as generative productions of alternative dynamic and relational situations, rather than representations of a world that is fixed. Harriet is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and is in the final year of her PhD at the University of Bristol.

The Pervasive Media Studio is a partnership between the Watershed, University of the West of England and University of Bristol. The lunchtime talks are partly supported by MyWorld, a project led by the University of Bristol to support creative industries in the region. Watershed is supported by Arts Council England.