On a recent visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, a group of teenagers didn’t take the usual guided tour. Instead, the teens took Art Institute staff on a guided tour of “their” museum. They were taking part in “Teen Lab” (in partnership with After School Matters) at the Art Institute, where they’d joined others worldwide in a digital mapping project.

Using digital media to design their own annotated maps of their museum experience, they documented everything from exit signs to their feelings about the museum or particular works of art.

Rahat Sajwani, a student in the joint AfterSchool Matters/Art Institute program, said she mapped “little places in the museum I feel that are secretive and that people don’t pay too much attention to.”

This webisode of StudentSpeak explores a unique social mapping project, Walking Papers, which is part of the Art Institute's exhibition Hyperlinks: Architecture and Design. The exhibition explores connections between architecture and designer and how these fields are exploring new solutions to issues of contemporary life. A project by the design studio Stamen, Walking Papers enables users to draw on a paper map and easily output the data into Open Street Map.

The project encourages teens to think about the accessibility of maps online and also the value of localized mapping—of making the map their own. Only locals know where the streetlights are out or where they had their first kiss. It is those moments that make a place meaningful.

In this case, the teens used the museum, which some of them had never been to before, as a local space to map. They scanned in museum floor plans and then printed them out and documented what they saw around a particular theme. As part of the project, the students discussed their work via Skype with the artist, Michal Migurski, who created Walking Papers.

“They discover the museum together, but they’re also discovering each other’s experiences of the museum,” Hillary Cook, the teen and museum partnership programs coordinator at the Art Institute, told Spotlight.

Cook said the digital nature of the project helped the students share their work with others, and the technology kept them connected and inspired to learn more.

“We can really show lots of other people these maps and have other people experience the teens’ path through the museum,” she said.

“Youth are coming to this program with a desire to learn how to use digital technologies,” she added. “And we, very luckily, have the resources here to be able to teach that in a way that uses digital media and digital technologies as a tool for art making and a tool for creative expression in the museum.”

The Art Institute is a member of the Chicago Youth Network of digital media innovators.

StudentSpeak, a video series produced by Spotlight, goes behind the scenes to show how teens use digital media in their daily lives. View previous webisodes here:
spotlight.macfound.org/studentspeak/