Instructor discussion questions

Chapter 6 Discussion Questions

  1. Chapter 6 argues that a map can function correctly and still fail rhetorically. What kinds of cartographic failure are least visible to a technical debugger, and why might those failures be especially important in prompt-based workflows?
  2. Design drift is framed as diagnostic rather than shameful. How can instructors help students distinguish productive iteration from aesthetic, data, or ethical drift that has pulled a map away from its stated purpose?
  3. Critique prompts can make design judgment more explicit and reproducible. What should count as evidence that a student's LLM-assisted critique was genuinely their own cartographic reasoning rather than unexamined model output?
  4. Keeper prompts are reusable because they reliably surface issues worth acting on. What makes a critique prompt worth archiving, teaching, or sharing, and what kinds of prompts should remain disposable?
  5. Metrics such as contrast, label density, load time, and touch target size can support critique but also become false authority. When should a cartographer obey a metric, when should they contextualize it, and how should they document the decision for provenance and replicability?