Penn State helped shape Harrison Cole’s path to National Geographic Museum

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The hallways of Penn State’s Walker Building helped launch Harrison Cole’s cartography career, eventually leading him to one of the biggest names in the field: National Geographic. The large-scale maps he designed as a postdoctoral scholar for the Penn State Department of Geography’s renovation projects gave him early experience working with maps in physical space. Today, those lessons serve him well in his new role designing maps for the National Geographic Museum of Exploration, currently under construction in Washington, D.C.

The National Geographic Society hired Cole in June 2025. When the museum opens next summer, it will occupy the first two floors of National Geographic’s downtown headquarters and feature exhibits that depend on maps to orient visitors. Cole’s job is to create those maps, from wall installations and wayfinding signage to pamphlets and digital guides.

Cole, who earned his doctorate in geography from Penn State, said the work he did as a postdoctoral scholar in the Walker Building translated directly into the skills he now uses at National Geographic.

“It’s fairly unusual for cartographers to work in physical space these days,” Cole said. “Even if people have experience creating physical maps, they are usually printed on paper. Designing maps for the Walker renovation project required me to think about how people experience them directly, standing in front of them in physical space. That perspective was important and prepared me for this new role.”

The Department of Geography’s Walker Building renovation is a multi-phase effort to modernize its spaces on the second and third floors while showcasing geography in visible, creative ways. The first phase introduced new flooring designed by Cindy Brewer, professor of geography and former department head, and Nate Cherok, a 2024 alumnus of the geography program. The flooring depicts central Pennsylvania’s towns, rivers, trails and ridgelines, including Mount Nittany, as a way to connect visitors to the region’s geography.

While the floors connect visitors to the geography of central Pennsylvania, Cole worked on the next phase of the project: a series of large backlit wall panel maps planned for the main hallway outside the department office and graduate student lounge. This installation replaces a relief wall map that had been in place for more than 40 years.

The installation will feature six illuminated four-foot by six-foot panels, each highlighting a different continent and type of geographic feature through striking cartographic examples. Examples include imagery of Brazilian lagoons and dunes, Mississippi River parcels, Ugandan building footprints and Indigenous land claim boundaries in Australia, along with panels from central Pennsylvania, Bangladesh and Europe.

The project was made possible through a gift from alumnus Jim McCrory in memory of Peirce Lewis, professor emeritus of geography who died in 2018. McCrory recalled Lewis’s passion for the discipline and hoped the installation would continue that legacy for future generations of students.

For Cole, designing the hallway panels was a rare chance to think about maps as experiences rather than tools. The project required him to consider how people experience maps as part of their environment, something he now applies in his museum work.

“For me, maps are more than tools of navigation, they’re experiences,” he said. “What I ultimately aim for is a positive reaction, that someone looks at the map and says, ‘Oh, that’s cool!’ When that happens, they’re much more likely to engage with the message being communicated.”

That emphasis on experience also guided his doctoral research at Penn State. Cole studied tactile maps for people who are blind or have low vision, work he said that taught him to think about accessibility as central to design rather than an add-on.

“Thinking about the lived experience of people with visual disabilities was really important,” he said. “It wasn’t just a matter of asking, ‘Is this legible? Is this usable?’ and instead considering whether the design creates an experience that is engaging and meaningful in a broader sense.”

As a postdoctoral scholar, Cole extended his work beyond research by co-founding the GeoGraphics Lab, a multimedia cartography laboratory on the first floor of Walker Building administered with support from the Peter R. Gould Center for Geography Education and Outreach. The lab offers professional geospatial visualization services for outside clients while giving Penn State students and faculty a space to collaborate on design projects.

As an adjunct instructor for Penn State, Cole carried those lessons into the classroom. He taught introductory and advanced cartography courses and said the experience helped him understand how people encounter new material for the first time.

“Learning is kind of an exercise of vulnerability in a lot of ways, like you have to admit that you don’t know a thing in order to understand it,” he said. “Being sensitive to that is really important in getting people to engage with you meaningfully. I like to think that I impart some of that into the maps that I’m creating now.”

Looking back, Cole sees a clear line from his Penn State experiences to his new role at National Geographic. The hallway maps in Walker, the GeoGraphics Lab, his teaching, and his research all gave him opportunities to experiment with how people experience maps in physical space. Now, he is applying those lessons in a museum that will welcome visitors from around the world.

“I feel like everything that I have done is coming together,” he said. “Thinking about maps, multimedia design, wayfinding, science communication and education. Everything I’ve done, I can connect it to what I’m doing now, which is very exciting.”