Being an Architect and avid photographer, I used to travel quite often. Around the year 2000, I used to carry printed maps at various scale with the locations of various buildings. My whole Chicago trip was done like that, and one can understand the difficulties that came with that. After this, I started using Google maps to map out all the interesting buildings and to make trip plans, etc. for my own use. This was beforethe time of Local Connect.
(Below is a screenshot of my New Delhi Architecture Guide Map)
My 82 year old father was a Professor and an author. His memory is being affected by the onset of Parkinson’s disease. This made me understand that memory was a fleeting thing. So, it became very important for me to document and record my memories. Google maps made it convenient to do so. While doing this, I stumbled upon being a Local Guide.
Many of my contributions are towards architecture. Before Google street view, I dreamt of linking photographs of all the buildings in downtown St Louis, Missouri, USA to its location in a map (around 2005). That project never took off and is never needed after Street view.
Currently I live in Bangalore, India. I want to make Bangalore readable, understandable and better experienced through Google maps. Recently, my pet peeve is to record the walkable pavements along the inner city roads that will help the pedestrians. I strongly feel this “Walkable Bangalore” should be incorporated in the vanilla google maps itself.
Being a local guide gives a unique opportunity to document and record a piece of reality during different times of the day, month, seasons and the year. This rendition gives a better picture of a place. This cannot be achieved by a tourist.