Luis Vicente is a design history practitioner with a strong interest in the sea and how humanity has engaged with it through time and space. For Luis, water should be seen as a connector, rather than a barrier, as many communities have crossed and inhabited it, designing objects through this interaction along the way. Having previously studied notions of space in European colonial cartography and hybrid designed objects, his dissertation focused on the study of colonial cartography as a designed object, particularly that produced by the Spanish in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Philippines. After his Master’s degree, Luis is looking to progress his career in the field of cultural engagement alongside his interest in maritime studies, and is currently working for Royal Museums Greenwich aboard the Cutty Sark.
Luis Gonçalo Vicente
If there is anything that I attempted to do throughout my final project in the MA Programme, it was to showcase how maps are highly designed objects, as opposed to the objective representations so many take them for. The maps I analysed were charged with an intense selection, addition and removal of local observation, and this information selection and standardization of representation is an integral part of map production. These designed objects were a result of the choices taken by the different participants in the making of hydrographic and cartographic objects - choices which should be thought of as design ones, since they impacted the final characteristics of the map in the way they were made and the way they were to be seen. Taking a detailed look at the process of making the final printed maps of Sorsogon and the Filipino Archipelago reveals the design choices taken by the map makers, when seeing what disappeared and what was added. As designed objects, made by someone for something, maps represent an important object to study through design history. One of the earliest calls for this study was by David Woodward in 1985, in his work ‘Cartography and Design History: A Commentary’. Here, Woodward, one of the initial editors of the History of Cartography volumes, states that ‘it could be argued that maps are among the most intensely designed graphic products of man's material culture […] designed for often very specific functions of visual representation and communication’. According to him, design history would aid in resolving two particular issues related to the study of cartography history. The first issue being ‘since by mythologizing these maps we tend "to lose the memory that they were once made" - the maps-grow-on-trees syndrome - the apparent necessity of understanding how the artifact was made is removed’. The second being that ‘by mythologizing maps and mapmakers, by encouraging the idea that these objects and people appear to be something important by themselves, we conveniently abolish complexity and contradictions and encourage the removal from their political and social contexts’. However, it seems as if the connection between cartography and design history never materialised to the level that Woodward considered it should have, with the secondary literature containing few entries which could be classified as such. Recognising this gap in the field led me to focus on the of map-making and the people behind it. As I move beyond my MA programme, I hope my research can be a step in the direction of a wider design history of maps and their subjective making.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, European voyages of exploration sailed across the Pacific Ocean, using increasingly technologically precise instruments and methods in the production of hydrographic and cartographic information. This information, in turn, returned to Europe and was translated into an extensive production of published maps, contributing to a growing sense of “planetary consciousness” in the European imperial subject.
While most of the bibliography on this tends to focus on British and French efforts, the Spanish had been present in the Pacific for centuries before, a presence centred around the Acapulco-Manila Galleon trade. Increasingly under pressure by British and French incursions into their supposed “Spanish Lake”, Madrid opted initially to focus on earlier explorations of the Pacific; however, they quickly began using increasingly precise methods in an attempt to keep up with their European counterparts. The Malaspina Expedition was the height of Spanish use of Precision, a five-year voyage throughout the Pacific coastlines under Spanish control.
My dissertation focuses on the hydrographic and cartographic production done in relation to a specific section of the Expedition, a nine-month period spent in the Philippines, between March and December 1792. Focusing on one of the most important border zones of Spanish colonial presence in the Pacific, the dissertation aims to look at how precision and printing intentions influenced map design in relation to the information acquired in the Filipino Archipelago, and how these two concepts interact with one another. Findings suggest that, at this time, precision is highly selective, and that printing intentions lead to a simplification of precise information – all in the name of colonial control in the Pacific.