Reading landscapes: Exploring drones in creative mapping

In Taking Measures across the American Landscape, James Corner and Alex MacLean explore the ever-changing landscape from the aeroplane. In this paper we replace the aeroplane with a drone and explore how drones can advance creative mapping through a combination of drone imagery and collage-like mapping techniques, as well as explore their use in onsite fieldwork. Throughout our explorations, we reveal how the drone as a media ecology mediates the designer’s understanding of the landscape and creates new site-specific landscape knowledge. We argue that the use of drones and drone imagery advances creative mapping by enabling a volumetric view that provides new spatial insights. Both in fieldwork and in the post-processing of drone imagery, the volumetric perspective helps to reveal the landscape’s vertical structures, the human, more than human and landscape relationships, and the tangible and material reality of the landscape. As such, drones in creative mapping expand our visual understanding and reading of landscapes.