Thoughts on the GeoDesign Summit
I’m sure many of you have been following #geodesign on Twitter, but I thought I’d add some of my deeper thoughts. First off, yes everyone in attendance realizes that we’ve all been doing this since the beginning of time. GeoDesign wasn’t invented by anyone in particular, that was clear to everyone.
So I guess the next question what is GeoDesign and why do we need to even define it, especially if we’ve been doing this for years anyway? Since we’ve all be already been doing this for years shouldn’t this be easy to define since we already have an understanding of it? A Wikipedia entry has been started and I’d encourage everyone to take a look at it and refine it based upon your experiences.
I think a couple things helped bring so many people together from so many different disciplines. With Architects, Planners, Engineers, Technologists, Researchers, Professors, Graduate Students and “other”; there was academia, government and private industry. The one person in our industry that has the pull to get this done is of course Jack Dangermond. He was also gracious enough to allow the organizers to use the new ESRI Q Building which was perfectly set up for a conference of this size.
Adena Schutzberg and Matt Ball both did a great job diving deep into the conference and it would be a good idea to read up on what was discussed and what needs to be done to move forward. What I’m going to talk about is what I think came out of the Summit and what should be the next steps.
First off, there was a little push-back that was acknowledged at the Summit which seemed to revolve around the fact that some small group of people seemed to think they could take ownership of something everyone has been doing for years, GeoDesign. I was also a little on edge about what might have come out from this Summit, but in the end it was unfounded. The group of folks from Michael Goodchild to Carl Steinitz all where very pragmatic about GeoDesign, how we involve more in the process of design (how crowdsourcing can be involved), to even deeper issues such as how we must fundamentally change how we as humans impact our environment.
Many showed examples of GeoDesign projects that they are currently work on to ones that were completed decades ago. Also despite the Summit occurring on ESRI’s campus, there were many examples showed that included non-ESRI technology such as GRASS, Google Earth and SketchUp. Jack also stood up on stage and hoped next year the organizers could include other software platforms and technologies that weren’t on stage this year.
So this brings up what to do next. Where do we go from here. Jack asked everyone in attendance if they thought we should move forward with the GeoDesign concept and everyone agreed we should. The details on how were to do so was what we discussed Friday morning. There will be a GeoDesign Summit next year. Tom Fisher the Dean for the College of Design at University of Minnesota offered to host it there. Given the warm weather though many though Redlands would be a great location to hold it again (Mid 70s in January is hard to beat). Jack said that if the committee wanted to hold it at ESRI again he would offer up the facilities again. Jack also said he wanted to unbrand the summit from ESRI and have it stand alone. To do this the Summit will be moving off of the ESRI servers on to its own and engage other potential stakeholders.
Since there was so much content created and organized there was a discussion on how to best disseminate the data out to everyone. This was probably the most contensious discussion. On one had you have those who wanted to write books (grey hairs) and on the other there were those who wanted to set up a wiki and get more community involvement. In the end it appears we will have both, a GeoDesign book you can get signed by your favorite GeoDesigner and a wiki the community can showcase their ideas and collaborate.
One problem is how to get this information out to the community at large. Organizations such as the APA have the tools in place (and not ESRI branded) to facilitate getting the word out to their members. Since there were many researchers present, there was also questions about how we can get funding in place from NSF or possibly even the World Bank since better planning and design is critical to helping reverse the destruction of the planet.
So bottom line? I admit I’m not one with too much patience for “University think” and there was plenty at the first GeoDesign Summit. But at the same time there was so much practicality shown that it isn’t hard to want to get Design and GIS more interconnected. One group that I think was underrepresented at the Summit was Technologists (I can’t say Architects or Designers because in this crowd that means something else). The gap between “GeoDesigners” and the public needs to be bridged with our work and our expertise. Making sure that this is represented in this GeoDesign initiative is important and we are those who need to make sure this is grounded in reality and not locked up in University research.
So lets see what happens. Will there be continued push back to “GeoDesign” from the geospatial community or will people want to be involved on the ground floor defining and encouraging GeoDesign? I think we all realize powerful things happen when there is a marriage of design and GIS.
[...] Thoughts on the GeoDesign Summit Thoughts on the GeoDesign Summit [...]
Thanks James for the synopis. At the beginning you say “Since we’ve all be already been doing this for years…”. At the end you say “… will people want to be involved on the ground floor defining and encouraging GeoDesign”. Is this, or is this not, a new field?
If the Wiki entry will answer that question, then someone should add an entry to Dangermond’s early work @ Harvard. How about specifics on who and where else this sort of work has been done? As a geologist not an architect or designer, I’d love to see potential cross-over areas!
How about this? It isn’t a new field but one that hasn’t been defined yet. We are all doing similar things on our own with no real direction. Getting organized might help improve the relationship between Design and GIS.
Yes perfesser, that helps. Keep’on truckin’, um, bloggin’.
Or this could be a distraction while Google wipes us all out.
LOL -
See my latest blogpost, and correct me on OGC if I missed it.
Let’s see…an initiative to describe and promote holistic use of CAE, GIS, demographics and social policy.
To me GeoDesign is both academic navel-gazing as well as top-cover for Dangermond’s strategic interest in finding new datasets to co-opt into FGDB.
I think Jack’s trying to move ESRI closer to buildings because Google has given his market growth opportunities outside the professional space a short haircut.
I’m not saying that might not be the case Archie, but I never got the feeling from anyone who keynoted or facilitated (including Jack) that this was anything more than something that has been building for years and finally technology (yes including ESRI’s) is enabling the visualization and interoperability we need.
I’m not naive in thinking though that money isn’t a factor for ESRI or everyone else who was there. Yes we want to “save the world” though better planning, but we also want to put our kids though college and retire to a golf course in the sun belt. For me I’d just assume live on the beach and use a metal detector to find lost Spanish gold, but here I am with a mortgage and a wife.
ESRI will need to redesign their software before they can be a credible participant in the world of BISDM, GeoDesign, and BIM.
As for ‘building for years’ I’d aver that Jack’s spending the past year or so talking architecture with the Dane’s has got him thinking about more lofty and academic ideas, and the new building was his muse. Architects are good for that sort of artsy-fartsy stuff. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
If this is ESRI’s survival strategy, it’s a curious one.
I can’t speak to ESRI’s survival strategy; Jack didn’t let us in on that.
As to putting him on a couch and seeing if his need to pay a Danish Architect is part of his need to help guide the world though GeoDesign, I’m not sure I can look that deep into his soul.
I think ESRI sees the magical center of geospatial has moved north from Redlands to Mountain View, particulary in the communities of practice like the educational space, where the ‘freedom’ of Google is so attractive.
I think GeoDesign is an effort to recapture the dialog and mindshare of the community and to refocus onto a ‘professional’ discussion with rigorous methods.
This is grand marketing theater, and something Mr. Dangermond does exceedingly well. With the ability to persist and nurture a concept over years, ESRI was able to capture immense market share when competing against profit-driven companies focusing on the quarterly bottom line. It’s going to be interesting to see if he can reshape the discussion when competing with an entity that cares even less about the bottom line than ESRI.
As to how relevant all this is to most folks in their day-to-day GIS activities…well, not so much.
Can’t reply to Archie’s last comment for some reason so replying here.
RE “It’s going to be interesting to see if he can reshape the discussion when competing with an entity that cares even less about the bottom line than ESRI.”
Yes it will be VERY interesting. But don’t think that Google cares less about the bottom line. Google cares it is just that their bottom line is funded through other revenue streams and mapping is just one more way they can generate revenue – it is just not using the mapping technology itself. And that is why it is so disruptive to those with a more traditional business model.
ESRI is not about making money on advertising or trying to index everything around us; their business model is selling software and the maintenance plan associated with that software.
RE: “As to how relevant all this is to most folks in their day-to-day GIS activities…well, not so much.”
I think it is more relevant that we may realize right now. I feel the changes taking place now are laying the foundation for some very interesting changes that will affect our day-to-day GIS activities.
Undefinable, unlimited, unbounded, and composed of mystery itself, geodesign can not be conceived, as it is primary to the act of conception… Geodesign is extremely useful to look at geography every way .. as a certain element or energy has been expressed by different cultures, then work to understand the reason why each expressed it the way they did by looking at the similarities, differences, and histories of each of the cultural groups. This is the sociology of geodesign, so to speak.
paraphrased from http://adamapollo.info/sacred_knowledge/unified_harmonic_matrix/
just substitute any noun with “geodesign” it could make a good drinking game too.
…. next its on to the modified chuck norris analogies. like “If you can see geodesign, you are okay. If you can’t see geodesign, you are seconds away from pain. When geodesign goes swimming .. geodesign doesn’t get wet, the water gets geodesign, and geodesign can make a square with only three lines …
brilliant!!!
I don’t understand what is brilliant about the above comment. GIS by its very nature is undefinable and thus we are all schmucks for even attempting to do anything.
Frankly I’m tired of this undefinable nature of our work and welcome a chance to be at the genesis of something and work toward making this more than just a discipline defined by software companies.
Of course maybe I’m the idiot for even attempting this.
GIS is undefinable. So is architecture. So is poetry. So is music. What is definable is the public’s perception of the above. The public’s perception of architecture, poetry and music is quite defined. Not so with GIS, even less so with GeoDesign.
The purpose of GISCI is to shape the public’s perception of GIS. Realizing this, I became a GISP (after initially rejecting the whole concept). Likewise, the purpose of the GeoDesign Summit is to shape the public’s perception of GeoDesign. We’ll have to wait and see where this goes.
Sure, software companies play a huge role in how our work is defined, but that’s because they are us…and are building software that [sometimes] answers the questions our discipline ‘asks’ as we try to help solve problems. Of course, the product designers and coders may be hostage to legacy dreck which prevents rational progress, and marketing considerations mitigate against technical freedom – but that’s capitalism, baby.
The geodesign schtick is, definitively, an exercise in tilting at windmills while we move across the landscape. But it’s that very conversation that Jack’s trying to start. The presence of the dialog becomes validation for the process, and as the process evolves, it validates the requirements, and so on…all very academic.
ESRI is a huge force in the GIS/CAE/CAD/planning business-ecosystem. This process gets the people in these trades talking about your product in a new way. Again – this is redefining the conversation. And that is something that ESRI needs very much to do.
Which is exactly why I think everyone should be involved. If GeoDesign is about ESRI it will fail. Jack freely admits this. Sure all boats will rise including ESRI’s on this, but is that such a bad thing if we can get BIM/GIS/Architecture/Engineering and whatever else you think is GeoDesign to interop better and bring in crowd sourced data?
Glass half full or glass half empty here guys…
James..I saw you tweet about Leroy Jekins making it into a presentation. What was that all about? And yes, sadly, I know what Leroy Jekins is, just not in the context of why it would surface at the conference.
I can’t recall. Something about crowdsouricng I believe. That Leroy Jekins was the example of someone just saying the hell with this and going off. I’ve lost some of the context…
I like the idea of GeoDesign. It’s an idea that needs much socialization. I think that Carl Steinitz is an example of just having a “go” at GeoDesign. He didn’t ask anyone’s permission or try to build consensus. He just did it. While I don’t agree with all of his ideas, it doesn’t make them bad either. ESRI is much in the same mold.
@James — I don’t think it is as much an issue of the glass being half full or half empty, but rather being able to design a glass that will hold whatever you pour in it. That glass = GeoDesign….
Ahhh, yes. For the most part, it’s okay if a glass is half empty as long as the publican is watching and ready to back it up with another.
“we” will all need to work very hard to bring Autodesk and Intergraph and Dassault and Google and theremotesensingcommunity and survey companies and architects and…and, and, and — the rest of the ‘community’ — to the table on this. I think that will take a decade.
But maybe some of the people that matter to ESRI will be thinking about this along the way, and from ESRI’s perspective, that’s a good thing.
c3TWb8 =))))))))
[...] J. (2010) Thoughts on the GeoDesign Summit. Spatial Adjusted blog, 09 January [...]
[...] Fee, James. 2010. “Thoughts on the GeoDesign Summit.” Spatial Adjusted blog, 09 January 2010. http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2010/01/09/thoughts-on-the-geodesign-summit/ [...]