{"id":2999,"date":"2014-07-18T11:17:31","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T18:17:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/insider\/?p=2999"},"modified":"2014-07-18T11:17:31","modified_gmt":"2014-07-18T18:17:31","slug":"creating-our-future","status":"publish","type":"insider","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/insider\/creating-our-future","title":{"rendered":"Creating Our Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

New Tools Will Help Us Meet the World\u2019s Challenges<\/em><\/strong>
\nWe try to predict the future every day. You think about what the weather might be like. You think about what might happen with your favorite sports team. You think about what the future might hold for you.
\nBeyond prediction, some of us are actually engaged professionally in creating the future. Because as Peter Drucker said, \u201cThe best way to predict the future is to create the future.\u201d
\n

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2014 Esri User Conference Plenary: GIS–Creating Our Future.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWe live in two worlds.
\nWe live in the ordinary world\u2014a world where we go to work, we eat, we have our family, and we have our friends. We operate in this world in a stimulus-response mode\u2014things happen, we respond, and then we go about our daily lives.
\nAt the same time, we live in an extraordinary world of imagining, thinking, dreaming, and creating.
\nWe live in these ordinary and extraordinary worlds at the same time.
\nA good example of this is the life of an architect. An architect imagines, plans, and designs, and then creates.
\nBut you and I also do this every day in our own daily lives. We imagine buying a house, or we imagine a new career\u2026we imagine all sorts of things. And when we act<\/em> on our imagination, we create<\/em> something: we create a new future.
\nWe are also living in a world facing serious challenges, such as population growth, urbanization, pollution, natural resource depletion, and climate change. These challenges not only impact us as individuals, but affect everything<\/em>. This in turn is also affecting our social world in terms of social controversies, conflicts, and migrations.
\nFrom severe climate events, to drought, to food production challenges, the world we live in is a complex, interconnected web. We live in an unprecedented time where the work that you do with geography is more important than ever.
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GIS is Integrating geography into everything we do, changing the way we think and act.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nGeography as a science provides us the context and the content of our world. It provides a framework for understanding our world by bringing all our measurements together, analyzing and visualizing them, and ultimately results in a new understanding<\/em>. And GIS is the medium that helps us to understand.
\nToday, GIS is integrating geographic knowledge into virtually everything we do. It’s changing the way we think by helping us to see and understand things differently, within our own organizations as well as at the planetary level. And it\u2019s also changing how we act<\/em>. As Richard Saul Wurman says, \u201cUnderstanding precedes action.\u201d<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

GIS itself continues to evolve, and as a result your individual systems are now becoming part of a larger interconnected platform. Your servers are connecting, your desktops are connecting, and your apps are being fed by shared community content. This web GIS<\/em> is a new pattern that\u2019s coevolving with faster machines, web services, open environments, open policies, and networks.
\nWeb GIS is bringing together all of our data, technologies, and people. It lets you share your own focused work in the form of web maps and web services, throughout your organizations as well as on the web to the world. This creates a framework where we can collaboratively work to address the complex challenges facing our world.
\n

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Web GIS integrates all types of information, organizing and sharing your work both internally and on the open web.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWeb GIS is also leveraging advancing technologies\u2014the world of measurement, the world of computing, and the world of networks, and layering on top of that infrastructure. This \u201cnervous system of the planet\u201d brings our world\u2019s information to life.
\nIn addition, the app revolution is making this web GIS, and all of its content, available everywhere. Anyone can now access this new medium of web services and web maps anytime, anywhere, on any device, bringing GIS to life in whole new ways and transforming how GIS professionals work.<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

Fundamental to this idea of creating the future is the concept of geodesign. Geodesign takes geographic information and links it to the design, decision-making, and planning process using collaboration. It does this by building the power of GIS into the process, allowing alternative plans to visualized, compared, and evaluated. The end result is better, more informed decisions.
\nI was first introduced to this methodology almost 50 years ago by my professor, Carl Steinitz, and it set me on a course I\u2019ve followed for my entire career. And it\u2019s much more than just a landscape architecture concept or a planning concept. Geodesign is equally important for businesspeople wanting to locate stores as it is for farmers who want to plant crops. In fact, geodesign has a role to play in almost every activity.
\nFor the GIS professional, geodesign extends your work from the science side into the creative side\u2014from the ordinary world to the extraordinary world. I would like everyone to think about becoming geodesigners<\/a>. It\u2019s the right time for us all to move in this direction, because the technology is here now and it can play an important role in helping us to solve the world\u2019s problems.<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

The mission of creating a better future depends heavily on GIS professionals. It is you who can envision what\u2019s possible, understand and embrace and fully leverage these new web GIS and geodesign tools, show leadership, and do the difficult work we have ahead of us.
\n

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Creating a better future requires GIS professionals.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nSeeing the work you do, and knowing what I know about the technology and where it’s going, this isn’t just a possibility. I think it\u2019s actually inevitable. As GIS professionals, you are already imagining the future, and working hard to create it. You are the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","transcript_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[275982],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2999","insider","type-insider","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vision"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCreating Our Future<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/insider\/creating-our-future\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Creating Our Future\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"New Tools Will Help Us Meet the World\u2019s Challenges We try to predict the future every day. 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