Mission-Driven Mapping

Location:
Charlotte, North Carolina
Latitude/Longitude:
35.227086900000, -80.843126700000
Journal Entry:

Hi there, I am Koya, an Urban Geographer. I like cities and urban areas! I always find great food, tall buildings, niche neighborhoods, diverse people, horse trails and perfect grids for roads, city or country blocks, not so nice areas and traffic. I realize they are all connected. This is geography! If I can't figure out how they are connected, well then, I pull up old stuff like maps, photos or books to keep my mind going because I have an ungrudging desire to know. This is how I ended up working at Esri. My role at Esri is to support users to do amazing work, share their stories and help their missions. To do this I must start with a "beginner’s mind". The beginner’s mind is curious and sees endless possibilities. I take the beginner’s mind and try to either learn about a problem or achieve a goal. Let’s apply this to mission-driven mapping.

My first map was a mental map. The mission was to think about how I go from school to home and the goal was to draw it on paper. It seems easy at first, then it got challenging because you can see the journey from school to home in your mind but you might not know the name of a street or the store at the corner. The exciting part was that you did not need to know all the details--just the ones you made up.

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