Geographical design, or in short: GeoDesign, is a new buzzword. Since Jack Dangermond, founder and president of Esri, held his TED talk about it in 2010 GeoDesign is the talk of the town.
The first Geodesign Summit Europe was inspired by the Esri Geodesign Summit held annually in Redlands, California. With a particular focus on European case studies, the two-day summit provided a context where research met practice. The summit focused on geodesign frameworks and concepts, geospatial technologies that support geodesign and decision-making, and sharing real-world examples of geodesign in practice.
The upcoming event in Salzburg will emphasize on geodesign as a tool for collaborative planning and design, a method for helping to work across scales and disciplines to find design solutions that improve people’s lives and the environment.
Geodesign provides a design framework and supporting technology for professionals to leverage geographic information, resulting in designs that more closely follow natural systems. Or as Wikipedia tells:
“Geodesign is a set of techniques and enabling technologies for planning built and natural environments in an integrated process, including project conceptualization, analysis, design specification, stakeholder participation and collaboration, design creation, simulation, and evaluation (among other stages). Geodesign is a design and planning method which tightly couples the creation of design proposals with impact simulations informed by geographic contexts.”
Last weekend the Amsterdam Sonic Acts festival focussed on the geographical imagination and geophilosophy. Let’s hope an impression of the Sonic Acts conference will be online soon.
Meanwhile look at the third European GeoDesign Summit early October in Salzburg, read this free and nice introduction and watch a fragment of the Ted talk by Dangermond mentioned earlier below.