Mapa is a participatory art project in the form of a GPS webapp where games and technology come together to meet the urgent need to regenerate the environmental responsibility of the population in the face of the climate emergency that we inhabit. Mapa is designed to boost citizen participation by engaging the community around locating and recovering degraded nature environments as well as facilitating cultural and wellbeing activities like sensorial discovery games and seasonal plants routes.
Reactivos Culturales, 2020
Climathon Murcia 2020
Mapa is a GPS webapp that aims to increase citizen participation as well as local community creation around the need of taking better care of our closest natural environments. To do so, Mapa wants to help re-establishing a relationship between nature and humans by creating a virtual common space to give visibility to degraded environments, to share knowledge about plants, stories about the land, games to regenerate our senses, to give visibility to local sustainable business and local inclusive collectives. From this virtual space we step into reality and walk together towards nature with curious and caring eyes.
Mapa introduced the concept of “care collective” to support human organisation towards restoring biodiversity and repairing our ecosocial responsibility, putting nature regeneration in the centre. Care collectives bring together people who want to actively protect the planet from their closest environment by stepping into real actions, such as making degraded environments visible on the map, activating their physical regeneration or creatively communicating and educating in respect and sensitivity towards nature.
Inside the platform, Mapa offers the care collectives the possibility to geolocate a diverse variety of aspects: wild plants, earth stories, hidden treasures(geocaching stile), nature based practices, natural spots, local eco friendly business and local organisations or already existing collectives line up with the spirit of the project.
The moderators of the map already created a game route around the river area of Murcia that includes an illustrated guide to accompany the players along the way. The webapp offers mindful and playful practices to achieve the sensorial regeneration and nature bonding of the participants. Now they are in the process of creating a new route about medicinal wild plants that grow along the river side, so the citizens will discover their value and role to boost biodiversity of the land.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
Mapa has three objectives linked to environmental sustainability:
- Facilitate new ways of relating with nature from a caring, curious and playful attitude by the creation of care collectives.
- Promote citizen participation in order to discover, locate and regenerate natural environments that require care and collective attention.
- Empower creative thinking, nourishing the cultural needs of the users and promoting its development linked to sustainability and circularity.
These three objectives will be met by the solid creation of the figure we call “care collectives”. The care collectives will join citizens together to cooperate around a common objective: to regenerate the land and gain a sense of belonging in the process. We will encourage students, elders, educators, artists, local business owners, and municipality members… to engage and join a care collective or build a new one. The care collective's priority will be restoring nature around them and inspire others to do so. They can organise trash-treasure hunts, empowering the circularity of materials or try creative approaches that will link with their common interest, from planting local seeds on tree pits or organising photography tours to discover new plants to create a poster campaign for raising awareness around ecosystemic problems(like “el Mar Menor” case).
The environmental sustainability and the circularity aspect of the project will be supported by the municipality of Murcia, which recently celebrated the first fair on circular economy. We will use their support into waste recollection and circularization of materials as well as promoting and dissemination activities.Mapa community will have a Discord channel where they can get to know each other and organise events, trash huntings, sensorial walks or any other proposals. The creators of the project will nourish the community by organising activities every month, to engage them into different cultural, creative and cooperative ways to take care.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
Mapa wants to raise the value of participatory art proposals where playfulness, art and creativity are key elements in order to activate and favour an ecosocial awakening. We believe that games are great allies for helping us on the task of learning how to reconnect with nature, as they create engaging spaces where the goal of regenerating nature no longer looks like something really difficult and unrealistic, but a great challenge we can achieve together.
The prototype of Mapa was designed using graphic narrative illustrations, in order to make the aesthetics interesting and useful for communicating the concept and the way of using the webapp. The project includes original illustrations made by the author all over the webapp, to make the experience more appealing and entertaining to the user, especially during the game route, where we used audios to guide the user through the different stages and give the experience a warmer, fun and sensorial touch. We can also find original illustrations on the additional materials, like the game route guide or the worksheet of soundscape activity. (link to the drive shared folder: )Thanks to the new aspects that will be designed around the care collectives on the platform, the participants will get inside a gamified experience that will reward their progress and participatory efforts inside the app. To do so, we will design avatars, levels, progress bars using the metaphor of seed growth, challenges and virtual and real local gifts that will be linked to a 0 waste lifestyle. These aspects of gamification will help us to make the user experience more motivating and engaging.
The webapp experience will help users and care collectives to discover local eco-friendly businesses and local collectives, so it will create a better united society where everyone will be visible and will help unfold unexpected collaborations between artists, already existing collectives, local spaces, etc that will meet by using the webapp.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
Mapa aims to be an inclusive webapp, where everyone can cocreate, take care and share their knowledge about nature. To make it available for all, we will provide multiple ways to access the content of the app, creating audio content together with written one, adding subtitles to our videos and having one or more sign language translators for our local events. Outside the app, we want to create a tour around the different neighbourhoods of the city, to include the ones with fewer opportunities.
The public will be reached in diverse ways: From the local shops, by the use of posters and verbal communication with the owners, they can help us promote the webapp in exchange for appearing on the map. Schools talks and workshops to engage and empower the youth as change makers and early adopters of the concept of care collective. Through the community linked to trashbank, a project led by elders from the city that aims to collect trash from the mountains, that has already made contact with us. Through the community connected to DIP circular murcia, a work group about design and circularity transition we are part of. By engaging ecologists, environmentalists and activists and the communities behind them into the early adopters group. By Social media and local outdoor events.
The community that will be created behind Mapa will have the autonomy to cocreate their own regenerative events or codesing events together with Mapa team, as their content could be integrated into new routes for the community that the webapp will showcast or we could combine the community expertise into outdoor events where to facilitate workshops, meet the members of the community and get to know other collectives and their good practices like the network of Murcian seeds. We will develop together with ecologists and environmentalists a way to show data wise how the land and our qualitative relation with nature is improving, showing this information on the app for all the users to consult.
Please highlight how this approach can be exemplary
Sustainability is promoted from the core of the idea, a map that collects narrative media content aligned with the need to develop a deep relationship with the ecosystem. The care collectives are the ones who, by adding content to the map,help sustain the platform and the bond with nature, they nurture it while the map provides a sense of belonging and a virtual/nature based gathering space to activate our ecosocial responsibility, together.
The aesthetics supports engaging users to participate and boost cooperation inside of the platform, thanks to the gamified experience that the care collectives go through. Also, the user experience process together with the playful approach helps to sustain the participation in the platform and ultimately gives structure to hold our relation with the land, offering a daily mission to nurture our connection(ourselves, the community and the ecosystem), besides the rest of functionalities that the platform hosts to activate our individual/collective caring, creative and wellbeing habits.
The inclusion aspect supports the two other aspects in various ways:
Starting from the idea that a care collective can be formed by anyone and that their members can be as diverse as the biosphere is, you can get an idea of how supporting diversity and a sense of belonging can help us develop a resilient way of relating, between each other and nature. This horizontal way of constructing the platform allows a rhizomatic growing community to unfold and with it will emerge sustainability, diversity and richness geolocated on the map to discover multicultural stories, nature based practices and restorative voices as the map grows.
The approach that Mapa aims to accomplish will provide to the citizens the opportunity to get together and restore from where they are, to fragment a big problem into the size that will be manageable and achievable at a local level.
Mapa innovates, compared with other similar projects also based on gps locative media, on the following aspects:
The use of maps and locative media together with gamification as a way to improve citizen participation, promote communities creation and engage users around taking care of nature. The collective co-created cartography also helps bonding the cultural network of the city while providing new natural spaces for gathering around creative practices and activities.
The webapp also innovates on the space categories included on the map (wild plants, earth stories, hidden treasures(geocaching stile), nature based practices, natural spots, local eco friendly business and local organisations or already existing collectives line up with the spirit of the project.) because they will empower the cultural diversity and richness of the city of Murcia while providing a nourishing place where to sustain our relation with nature by knowing stories never heard before about the memory of the land, their habitants and traditions in relation to endemic plants and the changing of the seasons.
Mapa innovates by giving presence and voice inside and outside the map to role models like environmentalists, ecologists and artivists. They will provide examples and their know-how experience on how to take better and measure the healing process of the land that improves with every action the care collectives do. Also they will provide strength to the project in terms of adding ecosocial value, promoting and encouraging participation.
The use of graphic facilitation and original illustrations is an innovative characteristic that improves the communication of the concept and the user experience while also supporting the gamification outlook of Mapa.
The first step to accomplish is to work together with cgeomap team to develop the new aspects of the platform, following the gamified aesthetics and focusing on making the best of the user experience. This will be a codesigning period of prototyping and iteration that will last at least 5 months. During this time we will also renovate the current illustrations, adding the gamified aspects in relation with the new care collective profile creation, and solve the challenge of user autonomy in order to geolocate content in the map. During the developing of the new aspects of the webapp we will have few parallel ongoing tasks:
- development of nature based practices to geolocate on the app and in relation to a place(natural places inside the city and outside)
- Reach out to local businesses owners and freelancers that would like to be on the map and engage them to participate in community building.
- Reach out to communication media(radio, tv, newspapers, etc) to help disseminate the webapp.
- Reach out to local diverse collectives, ecologists, artists, etc, to invite them to be part of the project and add their activities or gathering places to the map.
- Research a way to measure and show the environmental positive impact of the platform.
- Reach out to the municipality to accomplish a cooperation agreement that will support the platform and the users, as well as the waste circularity.
After the platform is ready with the new changes working, we will develop a dissemination plan that will visit schools, cultural centres, neighbourhoods and different events to promote the app and get the citizens involved. We will also create performative actions and installations in order to present the app in the city.
In our plans it's really important to provide cultural events and practices every month, to nurture the community, as well as creating efficient channels where to gather and organise the community growing around Mapa using discord, newsletters, social media posts, etc.
1, Improvements on the already existing platform (June 2022 to December 2022)
Mapa used the technology of cgeomap to create a starting prototype. This technology allows us to geolocate and showcast multimedia content directly on the map and also relate the different locations together to create routes. It was a good starting point but it has some major limitations to improve thanks to the European Bauhaus support:
- Caring collective creation as a 1 step to participate: In order to start participating, Mapa will ask you to create a profile, but not a regular one, a collective one! Grab a group of friends and set up your caring collective. We’ll redesign the platform to add this aspect, together with a discord channel to organise the community's discoveries and cooperate to organise local regenerative and cultural events.
- User friendly participation: Now users have to fill in a form in order to add their discoveries to the map(degraded environment, plants, stories), then, we have to manually add the content to the Map. We will improve the platform so users can add their content to the map with autonomy and directly from the webapp.
- Include in the map the category of sustainable local businesses, to help them attract public and visibility as well as involving them in caring processes.
- Amplify the amount of entries allowed: Cgeomap platform gives us a limit of entries (50 locations) that we will expand to at least 500, so we will have enough escope to host the participants' content.
2, Nature based education to the schools (january 2023 - may 2023)
We will visit 50 local educational centres to promote the app, talking about nature based education and facilitating workshops to boost the participation of youth.
3, The celebration of a local event there to gather the whole community and share our experiences, regenerate a natural space together, tell stories about plants, traditions, memories of the land and facilitate nature based workshops. June 2023.
@RosarioCámara Beviá, 2020
Content licensed to the European Union.