ESRI #Geodesign Summit Day 2 PM

The afternoon of day 2 had attendees returning to their IdeaLab groups to finish out work begun the day before. By the end of the session each group was to highlight one key idea or ideas and/or actions for moving geodesign forward. Further details are to be presented on Friday morning. Here’s a summary of the quick Thursday reports - which to my surprise touched on many of the same topics.

Group: Developing the Nascent Theories behind Geodesign: Practices and Approaches

Questions/Research Needs:
Resesach on the social context (privacy, ethics)
Who is the designer
When is a plan? It can be dynamic.
Development of a case library
Activity: hold meeting next year to hear about progress, and to help create momentum - issue a geodesign challenge to companies, universities to come up with plans for topics that reflect Tom Fisher’s ideas for its use.

Group: Integrating Geodesign Principles into Education and Training

Questions to consider:
Who will be a geodesigner?
Should it be a degree or certificate? The group suggests the latter - available to all kinds of disciplines
It’s a post university education - but also useful to NGOs etc.
How shall we teach it? Design uses one on one and collaborative work - both are key
Activity: will be shared tomorrow

Group: Sketching, Inference, and Feedback

Challenges/Goals:
How to make sketching rewarding and compelling (so folks will use it)
Software features should include context sensitive tools based on type of drawing, regular feedback, multiple views of iterations of design and/or 2 and 3D, versioning, intelligent symbology
Communicating and story telling are both key
Big goal: Have the intuitiveness of graphics with the power of GIS

Group: Geodesign in Architecture, Focusing on BIM

Activities:
engage standards communities (AIA, IFC) and OGC (CityGML)
define biz process and practices of AEC and how they are related to geodesign - and develop use cases - and find gaps and research needs
Action: document above

Group: The Role of the Public in the Decision-Making Process: Enhancing Collaboration, Decision
Making, and Policy through Geodesign
Defined “Participatory Geodesign”
Identified twelve actions - from papers to panel discussions in conference to discussion groups, to experiments
Organized by several questions including:
What are the desirable technologies for participation
How does geodesign help public participation
How does it help develop consensus
Role of experts, the public

Group: Geodesign in Urban Areas

Cities as complex -so geodesign will be tested there.
Research questions:
Does geodesign bridge a gap between players?
There’s power in quantitive measures, but can geodesign can harness qualitative data, too?
Can geodesign create more evidence based practices?

Group: Geodesign at the Regional Landscape Scale

Topics of concern to experts
model integration and dependancy tracking
dealing with uncertainty
performance on large projects
distributed design change (field changes and distributed players)

Action: develop use cases - match use cases to Carl Steiniz processes
Big idea: giving designers access to same tools used for compliance

Group: The Role of 3D in Geodesign

Primary role of 3D is visualization
Potential in editing landscape feature - manipulating terrain itself, for example
Want to see a move from visualization to analysis
Need more technology

Group: Simulation, Analysis, and Assessment

Analysis of the design - what are the impacts?
Answering that requires integrating 3rd party models
needs to happen: integration of time
vision: dashboard as an interface for sketching and adjusting parameters
big challenge/action: build a prototype dashboard

Bran Ferren Chief Creative Officer at Applied Minds, Inc. offered the final keynote of the day. He is known in our community the guy behind the TouchTable and Terrain Table. Before that his jobs included roles at Disney Imagineering among others. He gave terrificly entertaining and rambling talk about a number of subjects, the most important of which was storytelling. How does that relate to geodesign? I’ll see if I can do his rambling path justice here and help explain. (His talk reminded me quite a bit of another great thinker who spoke at an ESRI event a number of years ago: James Burke.)

Ferren started out by reminded us that if the opening session of a conference includes a definition of its namesake, “you are still inventing it.” But he noted it and we must have some credibility since we convinced our bosses (or someone did) to let us come to the event.

He spoke about change and how its difficult to change and see change coming. Our parents look back at how the “before time” was grand and now things “suck.” We had to live through the change to Y2K (which was basically an excuse to get folks to buy new stuff). The publishing industry didn’t see the impact the Internet would have on publishing. (Some still don’t.)

Inventions span a continuum: from being fads to be things that are used virtually forever. As an example he put the CD radio at one end and fire on the other. The trick is to get behind inventions that are more like fire. Where does geodesign sit?

It’s hard to know. There are sometimes rules for predicting the future (like Moore’s Law) that work pretty well. Unfortunately, people don’t follow such rules - and in some cases we do not change. He cited the “goal” of the last few generations of getting a white picket fenced house as being the same. At first it needed a farm, to be able to feed the family. Then it needed an Internet connection, for someone to work from this idylic spot and spend more time with the family. In the future, the owner will still want such a home, but will now have an implant to work with and connect with the rest of the world.

Then we played a detailed guessing game where Ferren asked us to name the key “inventions” that changed humankind. It took quite a bit of guessing until we hit on, in time order:

language - which encouraged us to live together and put us out of balance with nature
written language - which made ideas permanent, instead of “dying” when the individual who had them died
telephone - which the newspaper of the day said was silly (and turned out to be the most valuable patent ever!)
radio - which came from a secret government project to create a remote controlled torpedo

Now, what do these have in common?

At the time of their invention (1) there was no sense of these “technologies’” importance
(2) no sense of these “technologies’” reason for existence, (3) no ability of most people to understand them and they all disrupted how we did what Ferren calls the old profession: storytelling, that ability to share ideas in a very human way.

Geodesign, he posited, is also about storytelling, it allows storytelling in a way not possible now - a way that includes development of consensus and buy-in, a way that finds things that are not obvious, allows you to quickly iterate your designs. It connects the human need for storytelling, computers/the Internet and the ability to change the world. So, clearly, from an invention standpoint, it has a lot going for it. But it has some holes: technology is not where it needs to be and we need the ability to move quickly and accurately between media - that is from paper and pen to model to computer simulation. (That he noted is why his company built the terrain table. Two-D touch tables could not give lay people a sense of terrain, so they “changed the medium” into something they could in fact touch in 3D.)

He left us with five (he said there were six, but I only found five) things we need to do to make geodesign a successful innovation:

1) make it compelling so the smartest young people are drawn to work in it (that requires a good story, he noted)
2) build trust by building successful users - as that is what wins over change resistant people
3) develop storytelling as a career track - it will be a core competency
4) develop a human interface - make it “easy” to you get in, and get out, people should be able to use any tool with which they are comfortable - such as a charcoal pencil
5) enhance education - current education in the US is poor and we need an educated next generation to use this tool wisely to create a better world (BTW, teaching is storytelling!)

The audience gave him a well deserved standing ovation. I will add one more thought on the matter: we (geospatial and geodesign practitioners) do need story telling to be a core competency. Storytelling is more than just clear communications, it touches the heart. I challenge ESRI to include “storytelling” as a key educational theme at this year’s User Conference. And, I even have a person in mind who’d be a great resource: Jack O’Callahan. He’s from a Boston suburb, Marshfield, and was selected by NASA to develop a series of stories commemorating NASA’s 50th anniversary (article from local paper including a video of him in action). I was taken by him when I heard The Eagle Soars on NPR’s Living on Earth. I can’t believe how excited I got following this 15 minute story of a young Indian who dreamed as a boy of reaching the moon.

We rounded out the day with awards to the top poster (The Nature Conservency, sorry I could not hear the title) and Lightening Talk (Using GIS to Facilitate the Design of a Sustainable City, Shannon McElvaney).

ESRI helped cover some travel and lodging costs related to Directions Media’s attendance at the Summit.