I previously posted about presenting at this month's GeoDesign Summit 2011, hosted by ESRI at their great campus in Redlands, CA. I am very grateful to have been given the opportunity to present to the group who was in attendance and to participate in the workshops that were offered. The other speakers were fantastic both in complexity and diversity of problems that they are solving and solutions that they are using.
In comparison to the 2010 conference, I would say that this year's conference was somewhat subdued. The first year presenters emphasized the criticality of the problems that we face as a civilization. Dean Thomas Fisher, UMn, gave a startling talk on our civilization as a Fracture Critical System that I'll never forget. The 2010 conference was the first time that I saw systematic recognition by a cross functional group that we have transformed from a society that inhabits and adapts to space on the planet to one that fundamentally changes and shapes the planet and the space around us.
This year, much of the emphasis changed to tools. There were even a couple of groups that referred to their "geodesign tools" or "their tools for geodesign." I also saw a tremendous focus on the bridge between Architecture and GIS, whereas in 2010, the discussions seemed more to embrace not only those two disciplines, but also engineering, construction, and even consumerism. Clearly, influencing the environmental and social impact of increasing urbanism is one important component in guiding us toward a more sustainable society. Next year, I hope to see more treatment of other systemic problems that GIS and engineering technologies address and which are other parts of this story.
For the talks, I was really impressed with some of the following:
- Danielle Cummings from Texas A&M gave a great talk on ground breaking research into gestural sketch interfaces
- Constance Bodurow, Laurence Technological University and Studio(Ci), gave a great talk about a 3D workflow with Google Earth, SketchUp, and ESRI products that showed how her group uses 3D GIS to examine social and environmental issues in Detroit
- Chris Pike from the US Green Building Council reminded me that professionals in many adjacent fields to ours still don't appreciate the opportunity and power of even basic GIS tools. I'm glad his group is getting it.
- I was happy to see Carsten Roensdorf, OS and OGC, presenting on CityGML
- The programmer in me is always happy to see someone like Stephen Ervin, Harvard, educating the masses about OOP
- Kimon Onuma gave an interesting demo of crowdsourced Urban Planning that was good for demoing the potential interoperability of Revit and GIS tools
- Stuart Rich, Penobscot Bay Media, worked with ESRI to give a really compelling demo of using GIS for solving spatial problems using detailed internal floorplans for buildings.
... and there were many more great talks.
Some other key takeaways that I had were:
- Continued focus on Planning, GIS-BIM, Sketching, Collaboration, 3D, decision systems
- My Galileo presentation was well received... at least I got some great questions after it!
(I've posted a narrated version of my talk, though note that the GeoDesign committee plans to post all of the live talks.)
- General desire by the customers in attendance for better interop between GIS and engineering software vendors
- Concept of “Geography of Buildings” – Interesting trend to explore, analyze, and even determine the layout and form of interior and exterior buildings starting with external geospatial and environmental factors
- BIM-to-GIS discussion focused on strong need for interoperability, increase in demand for facilities applications of BIM and GIS data, desire to figure out how to move BIM into operations workflow, views on BIM/GIS data for use in other systems
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