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Five Stars: Nature, Reviewed
“In his hand are the depths of the earth,
and the mountain peaks belong to him.
The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.”
Psalms 95:4-5
Google Maps is a platform which allows users to find places of interest on a map, switch from a satellite aerial view to a first person “street-view” to explore a city and find directions for going from one place to another. We attempted to explore far away parks with this tool, places we could only visit online at the moment due to our geographic location, to understand how that interaction works far removed from the physical. This proved to be difficult as many of the inside paths are not on the platform, leading us to seek alternative ways to explore these spaces and resulting in an endless scroll of reviews.
Most commonly used for rating services from restaurants to nail salons, Reviews on Google Maps also allows users to rate natural attractions freely and possibly anonymously, providing valuable insight into their experience with the natural environment while revealing the anthropocentric lens by which humans interact with nature and non-human species.
What would a medieval farmer think if you told them you can rate the amount of ducks in the pond from the convenience of your hand-held mobile device, possibly influencing the amount of visitors that come the next year? Is the shade of a tree and the cool spring breeze not enough to satisfy you?
Gardens have been used throughout history to transmit social values, from the domestication of plants in agricultural settlements and the feudal gardens of pleasure in Versailles, to the public parks in the Netherlands. Today, parks are not only the physical space they occupy, the plants they host or the animals that inhabit them, but they also exist digitally and remind us that we do not need to shape the bushes in person to make them reflect the contemporary dynamics which dictate that the value of nature is only as much as it can benefit the human.
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This piece is a contribution to the digital zine “Imaginary Gardens”, produced by the 1st-year Contextual Design masters students at Design Academy Eindhoven, May 2025
