Rachel Tandias

Rachel Tandias

This assignment was very interesting in that it allowed me to assess my ability to concretely depict my mental representation of my surroundings. I began this exercise by visualizing my everyday route across campus from my dorm near the Charles River, through Harvard Square, and across Harvard Yard. I decided to create a “heat map” showing the areas that I most often frequent. Interestingly, although I was able to envision the buildings and streets in my mind nearly perfectly, I found it incredibly difficult to depict these structures on paper. It was particularly difficult to represent the shape and relative size of buildings, and I found that I was only able to sketch the relative orientation of structures by mentally navigating through the streets.

After comparing my sketch to a real map, I was surprised by the number of retail and residential structures between the Charles River and Harvard Yard; as a student, I tend to think of the Square as a an academic campus rather than a diverse cityscape. The areas surrounding the science buildings and my own dorm (shown in red) were some of the most accurately depicted parts of my map, in both size and orientation, as much of my daily life is centered in these places. However, large regions of the Square such as side streets and humanities-based buildings (shown in blue) were depicted inaccurately or left off entirely because my interaction with these regions is very limited.