PICNIC07: Urban Playgrounds, Christian Nold

Does "participatory sensory mapping": what do you do with this data you can gather, how do you turn it into a political proposition? What are the tools we can use to rethink the space?

He blindfolds children and has them led along by someone else, using other senses (smell, etc.) for local area. Produces a sensory deprivation map, a set of experiences geolocated: beautiful. 50% of categorisations are negative, 22% neutral, 28% positive.

Turns this into getting kids involved with local politics: there's a road in front of the school full of traffic and smells.

Next project: lie detector + GPS unit, to create emotion maps. Tends to do these in areas of regeneration - e.g. Stockport. PDAs are good, but physical paper maps are nice because you can stand around them: they talk in a language people can understand.

Really really nice looking stuff :)