Focus “As GeoDesign can bring data to bear on those design decisions, it will profoundly change the way we live and inhabit the planet.” —Thomas Fisher, Dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota said Shephard. Szukalski showed the audience ArcGIS Online resources for GeoDesigners or Web mappers that serve as what he called an “excellent substrate” of content. “These new basemaps and others provide great maps you can use as is or to represent a great canvas for design or GIS work,” said Szukalski. These resources include „ The updated World Imagery map, which compiles the best available imagery for the United States and many cities around the world including London, England, and Geneva, Switzerland „ Bing Maps for enterprise, aerial, hybrid, and roads „ The new World Street map, which includes building footprints for major cities around the world Urgent Need for GeoDesign The summit brought together thought leaders in GIS, architecture, design, conservation, and many other fields including Michael Goodchild, professor of geography at California State University, Santa Barbara; Carl Steinitz, research professor at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; Kim Tanzer, dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia; and William B. Rogers, president and CEO of the Trust for Public Lands. They spoke on how GIS is being used in design today and on its great potential to integrate the creativity of design and the science of GIS. Fisher from the University of Minnesota spoke passionately of the urgency of the situation. Citing ideas put forth by the Pulitzer Prizewinning author Thomas Friedman and professor of psychology David Barash at the University of Washington, Fisher argued that humans have created a giant Ponzi scheme with the planet over the last several hundred years, sucking resources and exploiting labor to maintain a certain way of life. This has led to the creation of what Fisher described as “fracture-critical systems” like the one that led to the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2007. Other fracture-critical threats include the exponentially increasing atmospheric carbon accumulation and rapidly declining biodiversity. “Even the recent financial crisis grew out of a fracture-critical system,” Fisher said. “We designed financial products such that we increased the debt . . . where a few investment banks go down and they bring the entire global financial community down with [them],” Fisher said. “It’s a classic collapse of a fracture-critical system. There is a spatial component to this. The banks do not know where the debt lies. Here, too, GeoDesign can help us understand the flows of money spatially across the planet.” Fisher called a fracture-critical system a metaphor for the world humans have designed for themselves. But he pointed out that innovations such as GeoDesign can help reverse the course. “A lot of what we have been designing—our cities, our buildings, our landscapes—have been designed without a lot of information about the consequences of our actions on other species, on distant populations, on future generations,” he said. “As GeoDesign can bring data to bear on those design decisions, it will profoundly change the way we live and inhabit the planet. Through innovation, we can rethink the way in which we inhabit the planet, we can rethink the way we use resources, and we can prolong our ability to sustain ourselves. GeoDesign’s time has come, and it’s none too soon.” Dangermond concurred. “We need this right now,” he said. “We need to not only understand what’s occurring on the planet, but we also need to take more proactive involvement in designing what occurs. Then we have to promote those designs, those creations, those in our mind’s eye expressions, to the rest of society. That’s the challenge.” www.esri.com ArcUser Spring 2010 19