14 COVER STORIES GIS, Design, and Evolving Technology continued from cover GIS Users Are Making Geographic Information Mission Critical to Society The purpose of our annual User Conference is to focus on you, the GIS user: to focus on your work, provide you with knowledge and assistance, and help you build relationships with your peers. You are doing very important work in many areas, such as forestry, land-use planning, conservation, national security, and utilities. But at the same time, you are also building the information infrastructure on which will be built the next chapter in the history of the world. You are creating a powerful new kind of information that will lay down the fabric for creating a more sustainable future. The work you do is making a difference. And whether or not you realize it, you are working on virtually all the world’s challenges—from economic recovery, government transparency, urbanization and development, and open-space planning to environmental assessment, conservation of nature, climate science, and designing our future. One of the big challenges facing our society today is the rapid change that humans are making to our global environment. While there are certainly many amazing advances taking place in areas such as technology, health care, and basic scientific understanding, we are also severely affecting our natural environment—the foundational infrastructure for sustainable life. These changes are largely the result of uncoordinated, unguided human activities. Our landscapes are becoming more fragmented, depleted, polluted, and eroded; in some cases, they’re actually disappearing, becoming extinct. This is a tragedy for our future, and it’s happening largely because we are not consciously designing our future, and we are not evaluating and accounting for the long-term impacts of our actions on our communities, our environment, our society, our climate—our world. My message is simple. We need to move from a future that simply happens to one that is GeoDesign is a systematic methodology for geographic planning and decision making. users collectively build and maintain—layers of information, measurements, and analytic models—and plugging it into a new interactive process where one can design alternatives and get geography-based feedback on the consequences of these designs right away. “What if we do this here?” “What is the impact of that alternative versus this alternative?” This iterative design/ evaluation process is fundamentally how the human brain works; we try something, evaluate the results, and move on. This integrates considerations such as policies and values into the decision-making process. The concept of GeoDesign integrates all six of these steps, providing us with a rapid, adaptive process for creating a more sustainable future. GeoDesign Will Extend into Every Field GeoDesign is an evolutionary step in the GIS field. While very exciting for land-use and environmental planning, GeoDesign has broad implications for virtually all professions. This methodology will be applied in many fields—by retailers who want to understand the consequences of opening or closGeographic Sketching Geographic sketching is the central GIS tool for ing stores; by engineers who want to locate a road supporting GeoDesign. This new capability al- in the right location; and by utilities, farmers, foresters, law enforcement, lows users to quickly sketch their design ideas “You are creating a powerful new kind of energy companies, and military organizations, on top of suitability maps information that will lay down to name just a few. This and get immediate feedthe fabric for creating a more approach will move GIS back on the performance sustainable future.” beyond simply describor impact of the design ing the world as it is tobeing proposed. The GIS framework provides instantaneous feedback in the ward the idea of creating the future, integrating form of maps, charts, and statistics and enables geographic thinking into all the work we do. GIS professionals will chart the future using rapid testing of multiple design services. Dr. Carl Steinitz, professor of landscape ar- GeoDesign maps. These maps will become a new chitecture at Harvard University, first described language for us to communicate and evaluate the how the GeoDesign process worked by posing future, showing the world as it could be, encapit in the context of six geographic, or landscape, sulating geographic knowledge with purposeful design. This process is about bringing information questions. The first question is, How can we describe and science into the way that we make decisions. geography? This is done in a GIS by abstracting Our new president is fond of saying he wants to geography into a series of inventory data layers. put science in its rightful place. This is where I The second question is, How does this geography think its rightful place is—supporting the creation “You are working on all our world’s challenges.” GIS: Designing Our Future This year’s conference emphasized the interesting relationship between design and GIS with emphasis on the concept of “GeoDesign.” Today, GIS professionals work with geographic information to manage many aspects of our world. Design is a discipline and process where people deliberately create. Design is about purpose and intentions; it’s about seeing in our mind’s eye what could be, then creating it. GIS can provide a platform for integrating geographic science with design. I like to refer to this as the field of GeoDesign. purposefully designed with full understanding of the consequences. This will take many participants and more conscious and collective action—action guided by our best vision, science, and intentions. We need to design our future while fully accounting for and being responsible for the consequences of what we do. I believe GIS and GIS professionals hold the promise for accomplishing all this. GeoDesign is a systematic methodology for geographic planning and decision making. GeoDesign starts by incorporating all the geographic knowledge that GeoDesign is an evolutionary step, serving many different types of people and creating many new opportunities for GIS professionals. actually operate? Here, GIS is used to combine data with spatial analysis modeling to describe geographic processes. Examples include soil erosion, land-use and vegetation change, hydrology, and traffic flows. Process models predict or describe how various spatial phenomena change with respect to time. The third question is, How can we alter geography considering all the factors? GIS uses suitability and capability modeling to answer this question. Various map factors are overlaid and weighted relative to their merits for a particular use. These first three questions describe the world as it is; the following questions describe the world as it could be. First, What are the alternative scenarios for designing the future? This involves sketching out the options. Then, How can we quickly evaluate the consequences of those changes? Here, GIS can be used to evaluate the impacts of each alternative. Last, How should geography be changed? of the future with new kinds of maps that bring it all together. The Next Step Maps and GIS are changing. They’re becoming richer, smarter, and more dynamic. They are also becoming more pervasive and being presented using new styles, new patterns, and new techniques. The Web and Web 2.0-style mashups are leading to a new breed of maps and geographic analysis. People are integrating traditional GIS data (services) with new media types, such as social networks and real-time data. This movement will lead to geographic knowledge becoming even more widespread in society. This Web environment offers many opportunities for GIS professionals to be creative with new forms of cartography and spreading geographic knowledge everywhere. Adapted from the Steinitz model of landscape change, GeoDesign is a rapid and adaptive process for creating a sustainable future.