00:01Our purpose is to build a kind of community out of this group.

00:04I mean, how many of you know everybody in the room?

00:07No...Nobody knows, right?

00:10I want that to occur. I want you to know each other.

00:13I know mo...most of you. Well, that's maybe an exaggeration.

00:18I know many of you, and I know your work.

00:21And your work is really distinguished and it's outstanding and it's interesting to me.

00:26And so, mixing it up is what...one of the things I want to do.

00:32And we'll do that through some presentations, some of them very short, some of them longer...

00:37...and also just meeting and getting to know each other.

00:42Today, geospatial technology, or GIS, is very valuable.

00:47It's being applied in literally hundreds of applications and hundreds of thousands of organizations around the world.

00:55And it's safe to say it's making a difference in sustainability.

01:01It's helping us improve how we plan, how we manage, how we make decisions.

01:07And it's growing to become a kind of critical infrastructure in the world.

01:13But it's not design.

01:15It's bringing science to many fields.

01:18This is one of the passions that I have had my entire career, is bringing rational thinking and science to the way people do things.

01:27And yet, it's not design.

01:30The purpose of this meeting is to discuss this notion of these two fields...

01:36...geography, the science of our world, measurement, modeling, predicting, describing the world, mixed up with design.

01:47A purposeful, intentional process of creating things.

01:52Creating the future. Seeing the future in your mind's eye.

01:57And both of these things lend themselves to the spatial domain.

02:02Something that we'll hear from a number of the speakers on this morning.

02:08The notion of integrating these two fields is very exciting to me...

02:12...that we have a kind of continuum from measurement to making decisions...

02:18...that integrate all of our ways of doing things into new processes.

02:25This notion of GeoDesign is about geographic planning.

02:31It's about decision making and it's not just within the design field.

02:35It extends beyond what we traditionally call design, land-use planning, landscape architecture...

02:42...architecture, urban design, and so on, to almost every field.

02:48In other words, GeoDesign, I think, is a kind of evolutionary step.

02:52This is an assertion on my part, and like GIS, the technology...

02:58...which has become increasingly pervasive as a foundation for the way we do things, I think this...this new, dare I say field...

03:10...or body of knowledge, or thinking about linking these two worlds together...

03:14...I think will be used in almost everything we do as humans.

03:18It'll be done by individuals. It'll be done in collaborations and teams.

03:23It'll be done connecting citizens with government, with private practice...

03:28...all...all supported by new generations of technologies.

03:34The purpose of this meeting is to discuss this, influence some of the research that some of you are doing...

03:43...influence some of the professional practice that others of you are doing...

03:48...influence public policy and how we think about bringing these fields together...

03:53...influencing technology and how we build fundamental infrastructure for enabling these ideas to be supported.

04:02GIS technology itself, and we'll see some of this later today, continues to evolve.

04:08When I first met Carl Steinitz, who will be speaking later this morning, the...at the Lab for Computer Graphics...

04:15...we ran on mainframe computers and there was printer maps...

04:18...and it was goofy sort of technology in the technology domain.

04:23But the ideas were full and rich, and what Carl started there...

04:28...and other people started in other locations around the world...

04:32...gave meaning to, and purpose to, playing around with the technology.

04:37It gave a sort of sense of direction and got me totally turned on and excited.

04:45We moved from there to minicomputers and workstations and then PCs and client/server computing.

04:52Today we're moving to a...to a new platform. The Web.

04:57And we'll play with that this morning in some of your presentations.

05:00This afternoon and tomorrow we'll also show experimental things going on there.

05:05This environment is a new style for how geography will be served and how it will affect us.

05:13It'll touch not simply a few researchers, not simply GIS professionals...

05:21...not simply practitioners of geographic information...

05:24...but it's infecting and affecting virtually everything that human people...humans do.

05:33Location-based services are an example of it, showing up with little navigation and personal direction devices.

05:40That is exploding.

05:43But where that will go, bringing science, bringing the way that we understand the world...

05:49...and the way that we model the world into human behaviors is...is...just gives me the chills.

05:55I know that will happen.

05:57I know that from my experience of watching the technology evolve through these different stages.

06:03And I would suggest and assert here, that we're just beginning this particular field.

06:09Again, these are trends that are almost predictable.

06:14Faster computers, more bandwidth, more storage, more mobility in devices, cloud computing.

06:24For some of us, that's all brand new.

06:26For me, it's just another step.

06:29Some people describe this as disruptive kinds of technology.

06:32For me, it's just another step in the evolution of the enabling technology and power...

06:39...that'll allow us to...to bring these new ideas that will come out of this eeting.

06:45Organizations are beginning to serve geographic knowledge.

06:50And that's providing a new infrastructure for us to build on top of.

06:55Hopefully, some of the knowledge, notions, design notions that we come up with here today...

07:02...think about, present today, will be built on this kind of infrastructure.

07:08In other words, agencies will not be providing data files or maps...

07:14...they'll providing ser...they'll be providing services, and these services will be a new framework...

07:20...just like the Apple iPhone is providing a framework for all kinds of apps taking off and everybody touching them.

07:28These geospatial services and the ability to build creative applications on top of them...

07:36...will explode our field and the general interest of designing our future.

07:41And God only knows that we...we need this right now.

07:45We need to not only understand what's occurring on the planet...

07:51...but we also need to take more proactive involvement in designing what occurs.

07:58And then we have to promote that design, those designs...

08:04...those creations, those in-our-mind's-eyes expressions, to the rest of society, and that's the challenge.