Lab 4 (Patrick Chew)

Week 4 - Introducing ArcMap/The Pitfalls and Potential of ArcMap

This week was our first venture as a class into actually using Arc GIS and the ArcMaps program. I had a mixed experience, overall finding ArcMaps to not be an intuitive program and I can see why neogeographers tend to use other software or methods to create their maps. Alternatively, even with my brief interaction with ArcMaps, I can see that the potential for visualizing data in and around geographic locations of all sorts is incredible.

My first reaction to the program was that it is not intuitive. As a designer, I am very familiar with programs like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, as well as with some 3D modeling programs. These programs all deal with creating, recreating, or modifying objects, as does ArcMaps. But these programs are all more intuitive; the user does not have to click through many windows or scroll over many objects to figure out what they want to do. More importantly that this, in the above listed programs, the user can play around. I think that the inability to just play around, tinker, and see what happens, is what makes ArcMaps unappealing to the common user and neogeographer.

Conversely, as a professional program, ArcMaps has incredible potential. The ability to combine data in multiple layers is remarkable and even more complex than Prof. Illes described. Through ArcMaps, one does not only get an accurate idea of geographic information, but also any data that can be associated with those locations. Despite the difficulty in creating and displaying these layers, the final product that we created was quite impressive. Arc GIS is clearly a pivotal tool for all sorts of disciplines and, as Prof. Illes said, a remarkable tool for persuasion and argument.

I will do my best to learn ArcMaps during the remainder of the class because I feel that it is a program with great potential and hopefully I can use it in some sort of design projects as well. However, I think moving forward, it would behoove the esri developers to work with designers of programs like Photoshop to create an interface that is easy to use both at the amateur and professional level. I feel like I literally just followed the tutorial step by step, but if I were to try it on my own, I would get nowhere. If ArcMaps were a more fun and intuitive tool to use, I think it would be far more popular.