This lecture explores material intelligence—a way of thinking through making that links design practice to the study of maps, media, and material culture. The concept emerges from my research on nineteenth-century panoramic cartography, including the 1820 Circular View from Mount Rigi, and from a broader inquiry into how graphic media act as instruments of embodied knowledge. The Rigi map translated the act of turning on a mountain summit into a circular diagram of national space, aligning visual system with bodily sensation. Its design choreographed movement, touch, and perception, transforming geography into an immersive experience that carried political meaning in post-Napoleonic Switzerland, where shared visibility served as a metaphor for unity.
I build on this historical example to describe and theorize material intelligence within traditions of material-culture studies that treat artifacts as agents of thought and inquiry. Makerly processes—replication, reconstruction, and re-invention—can serve as modes of research as well as creative practice. In this framework, making informs research and research informs making, revealing how graphic and cartographic design mediate between perception and world.
Classroom projects extend these principles through a three-phase sequence: producing a 1:1 study facsimile, re-creating the artifact to grasp its logic through analog and digital tools, and inventing new works that evolve from that tactile collaboration. These iterative engagements transform archives into laboratories of spatial imagination, demonstrating how digital fabrication and interactive print can reactivate historical media for contemporary learning.
Connecting nineteenth-century mapping to twenty-first-century design pedagogy reframes cartography as a design practice that produces—not merely represents—social and spatial realities. Material intelligence emerges as both a research method and a pedagogical ethos for investigating how visual artifacts shape ways of seeing, knowing, and belonging in the world.