Feminist Map Icons, New Cartographic Vocabularies

Abstract

Map icons are tiny pixel-based symbols that locate people, places, and events commonly prepackaged into icon libraries. Given their size and ubiquity, map icons are often overlooked and applied universally in maps despite reflecting social injustices. Feminist mapping offers an alternative framework that centres power structures, situated knowledge, and embodiment and can be used to challenge and expand mapping conventions. Recent work in feminist mapping and icon design explores the depiction, abstraction, and erasure of bodies in icon symbolization and provides a framework for redesigning icon sets like the Mapbox Maki library. Building from this work, I facilitate a series of workshops based on this framework for feminist icon design where designers used sketch mapping techniques to redesign the Maki icon set, one icon at a time. I collate the icon sketches across the workshops and semiotically analyse the impacts of feminist principles on their designs. I argue that a feminist framework for icon design disrupts conventional and universal approaches to icon design concluding that feminist perspectives generate alternative graphic vocabularies for icon design and expand possibilities for feminist map design, more broadly.

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