What’s Wrong with Google Street View?

Research project with Jane Wolff
2021

Maps build stories about places, and sophisticated digital platforms like Google Maps and Street View make those stories feel ever more real. That impression of reality has troubling (and political) implications for design. Our teaching experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, when reliance on these platforms has accelerated, raises concerns about these models’ implicit (and limited) frameworks and assumptions; their singular, totalizing views; their inability to portray embodied experience; and their strange elisions of space and time. Google Maps and Street View offer a very partial view of landscapes—in both senses of the word—and as they gain authority, they obscure other essential stories.