Icons of Home: Creating a Map Icon Library for Housing Boston

Join Dr. Meghan Kelly, LMEC's 2025 Designer-in-Residence, for a community map-creation project!

While tiny and commonplace in popular applications like Google Maps, map icons carry significant meanings locating people, events, and places like home.

Home and housing in Boston also have significant meanings that vary from person to person. They range from everyday place-making, stories of home, and mobility within neighborhoods and communities, to past and present transformations in how homes and housing are built, bought, and sold. Map icons are not “one-size-fits-all,” and we need map icons that better reflect these varying meanings including the experiences of and the dynamics of home and housing in Boston.

In this workshop, led Dr. Meghan Kelly, we will collectively create map icons related to home and housing for the city of Boston. To begin, we will discuss home and housing in Boston before exploring the role of map icons and map icon libraries in mapping. We will then turn to a hands-on activity where we will iteratively create map icons for the city that better reflect our experiences of home and housing. This icon set will be publicly available to mapmakers and educators for local mapping initiatives.

Dr. Meghan Kelly is a cartographer and an assistant professor in the Geography and the Environment Department at Syracuse University. Her work draws on feminist practice and challenges our conventional understandings of space and place using new forms of visualization. She previously served as LMEC's Designer-in-Residence in 2025.