The Final Map!

So since last class, Madeline and I really took everyone's feedback into account and decided to re-vamp our map to make it more visually pleasing and to have it serve our purpose better. We put our map into illustrator and traced over the sections that we wanted to include in our map - the sections that we had a lot of data and we knew WPI students lived. We also traced over the WPI campus, part of Becker, Elm Park, and Institute Park to give our map some perspective and show the viewer the close proximity of off-campus apartments to WPI. We only re-labeled Highland Street and West Street, two streets that we thought might be hard to infer by just looking at sections of a map. We decided that, instead of plotting points at certain addresses based on our data, we would extrapolate (i.e. sort of make up) that data into areas we know WPI students live so that students could see both price range and population density of a particular area. We did this by modeling our map after a heat map, with different colors representing different price ranges.

Our heat map inspiration! Source: https://community.tibco.com/questions/creating-geo-heatmap

We also changed the background colors. We used muted, lighter colors in the background so that our brighter, heat map colors would stand out more. We used muted tones of WPI and Becker's school colors to denote the land area those two schools owned, and we used a muted gray for the surrounding area where no WPI students lived. We decided to include reliable landlords and their contact information, WPI's Office of Residential Services who can help figure out how to move off campus, and wpi.jumpoffcampus.com, the website Maddie and I used to find our off-campus apartments.

Our final map!

One of the most rewarding parts of this project was when a first-year student saw our map and told us how helpful it would be. Her comment showed us that we were on the right track with our ideas and that this could actually be a useful product!

Here is our artist statement:

We were assigned to create a map of ‘something’ in Worcester. Immediately,we were tempted to make a map that was a technical tool for people to use to traverse through an area to get from point A to B, but after learning about the use of conditional rhetoric used in maps, we recognized our power as cartographers to create a map that acted persuasively. We decided to create a map of off-campus apartment options around WPI. “Off-Campus Apartments Around WPI” is a map that shows the price ranges of off campus apartments in WPI’s surrounding area, as well as the how many students live off campus in the surrounding areas. We modeled our map after heat maps, a genre of map that viewers would be familiar with.We chose bright colors to represent each of our price ranges, similar to how heat maps use neons to denote different temperature ranges. We used a muted grey for the areas that were not occupied by WPI students so that the densely populated areas would stand out, and the viewer would easily be able to see where WPI students are living. We only used major street names so that viewers could see general trends in sectors of the surrounding area. Viewers will look to the side panel for the map key and see the additional information we included below the key, which includes reliable landlords and more resources. We intend our map to be used by current WPI students who are unsure about where to look for apartments in their price range, and what resources to use while searching for off campus apartments. Many students and their parents are concerned about the pricing of apartments, as well as who the students’ neighbors would be. Our map works to show the likelihood of having a WPI student as a neighbor, and the wide range of prices these apartments could be.