In this episode of 15 Minute Maps, I speak with David de Ridder, Senior Research Fellow at the University Hospital of Geneva (HUG), who specializes in spatial epidemiology and digital public health.

David shares his dream map: a next-generation routing system that doesn’t optimize for speed, but for health.
Think: a navigation app that automatically guides you through routes with less air pollution, lower noise, fewer allergens, and greater safety — subtly improving your daily environment without adding friction to your life.

Together, we explore:
• How spatial data helped track and respond to COVID-19 in Geneva
• Why tiny differences between neighbourhoods matter for public health
• The concept of exposomics — the full range of environmental factors shaping our bodies
• The promise and challenges of “passive” digital health tools
• How smarter maps could reduce stress, prevent disease, and promote healthier cities

If you're curious about the future of mapping, digital health, or how your environment shapes your well-being, this episode is packed with insights.

Ever Wondered How You’d Navigate the Ocean With No Compass, No GPS, and No Land in Sight? Well this episode once again proves the importance of maintaining indigenous knowledge.

That question led Bonner Professor John Huth, Harvard physicist and renowned member of the team that discovered the Higgs boson, into an entirely different field of research — mapping the ocean waves that Indigenous Marshallese navigators use to navigate their many atolls.

In this episode we discuss:

How Marshallese navigators sail between islands by feeling subtle changes in the direction of swells.

The challenge of turning experiential, embodied knowledge into something that can be mapped without reducing its cultural meaning.

Why he teaches a course on navigation that blends science, history, and Indigenous techniques — and why it resonates today.

How sensor data, drift measurements, and hand-drawn charts can help visualize a navigation system most of us have never encountered.

If we can map the wave structures that navigators feel, we can help preserve a knowledge system that’s at risk of disappearing — and better understand how humans read their environment.

This episode is for anyone interested in mapping, ocean science, traditional knowledge systems, or how we make sense of place.

We often talk about rebuilding after a disaster, but we leave so little thought for rthe materials needed. Have you ever thought about where all the rubble goes after a war or a flood?

That’s the question that led Guilherme Iablonovski, a geospatial data scientist at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, to dedicate his career to mapping matter itself — from concrete and steel to the global flow of sand, food, and everything in between.

In this week’s episode of 15-Minute Maps, Guilherme joins me to talk about:
Why the world needs a “map of matter” — a way to trace what materials are where, and where they move.

How cities have a metabolism, just like living beings — taking in, storing, and expelling materials in measurable flows.

What happens to all that material when a city is bombarded or flooded — and how understanding this could make rebuilding faster, cheaper, and greener.
How consumption habits in places like Paris can have invisible footprints across the world.

And why mapping matter could be key to tracking progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — especially SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities) and SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production).