AI-ASSISTED · EDITOR-REVIEWED

Theme brief

Feeling may mean emotion, comfort, safety, touch or atmosphere. Because these experiences are personal and context-dependent, show whose feeling is represented, how it was collected and where uncertainty or disagreement remains.

Official prompt
“The most abstract of the senses series. How would you map a feeling?”
30DayMapChallenge 2026

02

WAYS IN

Four map ideas

01
Collect a walk diary of calm, stress, delight and discomfort.
02
Map perceived safety at different times without treating perception as crime data.
03
Ask residents for places of belonging and places of exclusion.
04
Use texture and color to map how a journey felt rather than how fast it was.

03

IN THE DIRECTORY

Recommended tools

KoboToolbox

Collects structured, geotagged responses with consent-aware field forms.

Freemium · View details

Felt

Supports a participatory map with comments and annotations.

Freemium · View details

uMap

A simple choice for a small community-contributed feeling map.

Open source · View details

QGIS

Useful for anonymizing, aggregating and carefully mapping survey responses.

Open source · View details

04

START WITH A CLEAR LICENSE

Data sources

Consent-based personal survey

Collect only what the map needs and explain consent and aggregation.

You choose · protect participant privacy Participatory mapping responses

Publish an aggregation or anonymized extract rather than raw personal locations.

Set clear contributor terms OpenStreetMap base data

Follow the tile provider policy as well as the database attribution rules.

ODbL 1.0 · attribution required

Licenses are a planning aid, not legal advice. Check the source record and version you actually download; terms can vary within a catalog.

05

BEFORE YOU EXPORT

Cartography check

Aggregate sensitive responses and remove precise personal locations. Emotion data deserves more privacy than an ordinary point layer.

06

COMMUNITY MAPS

Selected work

Selections begin after this theme closes.

First participate officially by posting publicly with #30DayMapChallenge. You can then suggest that original post for our independent MapTools picks. We link to the source, credit every author and use images only with permission.

Suggest for MapTools picks