00:01Tom Fisher from the University of Minnesota.

00:02Thank you, Diana.

00:03One of the advantages of coming up last is with these devices, you can keep rewriting as you go.

00:08So I've been rewriting this, and we've heard a little bit of history.

00:12But before I talk about the infrastructure issues that I wanted to talk about...

00:15...I wanted to give you a little bit of history about why I think this event and geodesign is so profoundly important.

00:20And for that, I want to go back to 1452, and Gutenberg's invention of moveable type.

00:25As we know from Marshall McLuhan's book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, it was profoundly important.

00:31Moveable type, as an invention, and the inexpensive printed books that came from it...

00:35...led to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, scientific revolution in the seventeenth...

00:40...the political revolutions in the eighteenth, the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth centuries...

00:44...through one invention, through one technology.

00:48And there are three things, though, that I think are important to what we're doing here,

00:52and I just want to talk about as a result of that invention.

00:54One, as a result of moveable type and the Enlightenment that came from that...

00:58...it led to the partitioning of knowledge into disciplines.

01:02So that we now have knowledge neatly packaged into departments...

01:06...ensconced in their own buildings with their own language and their own literature.

01:10And this kind of partitioning of knowledge is something that pervades not only universities...

01:15...but corporations and the government at well.

01:18The second thing it did is it led to the separation of mind and body.

01:22The separation of humans and nature.

01:25And it led to the rise of the expert, the rise of the professional.

01:29The person who was trained, given advantage in the marketplace, through knowledge...

01:34...with others who carried out or implemented our ideas.

01:37It also, of course, led to the separation of us from the natural world, and the idea that we had the right to exploit it.

01:44And then the third idea that came out of moveable type, out of that one invention, was the abstraction of reality...

01:50...which of course, we see in the abstraction of the landscape.

01:53The partitioning off of the landscape into properties, into boundaries, the fragmentation of habitat...

01:59...and again, the idea that somehow we, as a species, have a right to own the planet.

02:07Now, this all changed in the twentieth century, at the end of the twentieth century, through two big areas, two discoveries.

02:14One of which was ecology...

02:17...which of course has its roots earlier than the twentieth century, but largely a twentieth-century phenomenon.

02:21And the second thing was computing, and particularly the Internet.

02:25And the reason those are important is that the previous revolutions came from an idea...

02:30...that moveable type led us to believe that the world was a machine.

02:35And we had a metaphor for reality that was mechanistic.

02:40We saw the world as a machine, the human body as a machine, the mind as a machine.

02:45The end of the twentieth century has brought an end to that three-, four-hundred-year cycle.

02:50And we now live in a new metaphor, a new reality, one which is based on the web.

02:55We see now the reality in weblike ways.

02:58We see neural networks in the mind, rather than as a machine.

03:01We see social networks.

03:03We see ecological and natural ecosystems.

03:07So a networked reality is the new reality that we are in.

03:11And the reason why I think this is so important is that GIS is a fascinating transition technology in this cultural shift that we're in.

03:20And that the paradox of GIS is it uses machines to create a weblike way of looking at the world.

03:29It is still in some ways very Enlightenment-based.

03:32It is still looking at abstractions of nature through layers.

03:37And it's still data driven.

03:40All of those are the legacy of the last 300 years.

03:43And yet by its mashing-up of information, and allowing us to see connections that were not seen before...

03:50...it actually propels us into the next millennium.

03:54It's a tool as profound, I think, as what Gutenberg developed in 1452.

04:02And geodesign, then, I think is a result of this intellectual revolution.

04:08It is not so much a tool, per se, it's a new application or a conceptual infrastructure of what arises out of this new tool, GIS.

04:18And it is weblike in its reality, reconnecting mind-body, left and right brain, humans and nature, and so on.

04:25And design thinking, the reason why design is so important is that because this kind of form of creative thinking is inherently weblike.

04:33It is inherently interdisciplinary, it's lateral and nonlinear, it's not entirely rational.

04:39It's about imagination as much as logic, about emotion as much as reason.

04:44It's about storytelling, as we heard Janet talk about today, as much as data.

04:48It's about aesthetics and ethics, as we heard David talk about, as much as analytics.

04:53It's about place, as we've heard Constance, Nicholas, and Tamara talk about, as much as space...

04:58...and it is about the world as it could be, as much as it is.

05:03So what I want to do with that preface is just talk about three different infrastructure ideas that we're pursuing at the University of Minnesota...

05:12...as a way to talk about how we can begin to implement this new weblike mind in our institutions.

05:21The first of which is a youth spatial project...

05:24...where we are really, literally beginning to, and talking about remapping the entire university around challenges.

05:30So that students would major in a discipline and minor in a challenge.

05:34And over the course of their time at the university, work interdisciplinarily with others around major challenges.

05:41Fresh water, immigration, poverty, homelessness.

05:45There's a long list of them that we're working on.

05:48And by that, it sort of takes us out of our sort of discrete, little buildings which are so neatly packaged in an Enlightenment mode...

05:57...and beginning to find connections, in our case, across three different campuses in the Twin Cities...

06:02...people who are working on these areas in multiple disciplines, with geodesign as the platform.

06:07And so there will be geodesign nodes, where different disciplines will be working real-time, around challenges...

06:15...and using the spatial knowledge that this allows, to help understand and find solutions to these complicated problems.

06:24The second thing we're doing is a net zero campus project...

06:30...where we are using geodesign to basically bring one of the largest campuses in the country...

06:37...there's over 50,000 students on the Twin Cities campus...

06:40...into a zero to net positive position.

06:46And one of the things that this does is it's reconnecting the academic and the operational side.

06:50It's not just academics thinking about this.

06:52We're working with all the facilities people, our students are working on the campus.

06:58And so it isn't about this separation of mind and body that came with the Enlightenment, it's about thinking and acting...

07:05...and using the campus as an opportunity to do that.

07:07It also is using a kind of neo-geography idea, which is where...

07:13...having students gather information, participate in this whole project...

07:18...as well as we're even thinking about our own internal barter currency, called Gopher Dollars...

07:22...that would reincentivize different kinds of activities.

07:27So, you know, things that should be extremely valuable, like clean water...

07:32...things that we want to discourage, like waste...

07:35...are reset, recalibrated in a new kind of an economy, internally inside of the university...

07:40...that we then monitor and begin to measure.

07:45And the third thing that we're doing is setting up what may be one of the largest immersive experiential labs...

07:53...it's a 6,000-square-foot geodesign lab that we're setting up in one of our buildings.

07:58It's an immersive space.

07:59The reason why it's so large is we want to do an experiment with geodesign and community participation.

08:04This place is big enough to get whole communities involved.

08:07There's this rack of projectors and motion detectors that will be projecting on large screens.

08:16It doesn't show in this image...on all four sides of the court as well as down on the floor.

08:21And so you will be able to bring a community in, and real time, begin to assess different ways of planning and making decisions real-time...

08:31...and building consensus in a space big enough to accommodate everybody as well as to project things full size.

08:39So we've also begun to do other kinds of maps.

08:42We've been doing layers, faculty members have been doing mapping of joy and pain in the city.

08:48We've been mapping happiness.

08:50We've been mapping other kinds of layers that are based on storytelling...

08:54...that are based on ethical ideas, and overlaying these onto GIS maps.

08:58Because, I would argue, that this is where geodesign takes us.

09:03It's not simply data, it's also affect.

09:06It's also feeling and emotion as well as rationality.

09:09And that this is the potential that this new tools creates for us.

09:12So as McLuhan said, the media is the message.

09:16GIS, like moveable type, is a tool that will transform our world, and will change the way we think and what we do.

09:26Geodesign, I think, is the message to come out of this media...

09:30...and it represents a change of mind and a method that really derives its power from GIS.

09:36And I think I would end by saying that we have put in place here an absolutely transformative set of activities.

09:44I think we should feel privileged to be alive at time when we're going through one of these major cultural shifts in Western culture...

09:52...something that doesn't happen except every three, four hundred years.

09:55And we're right in the middle of it, we're right at the brink.

09:58And also, I think, the sense that all of us should recognize the power of being in this room.

10:03Here, at the conception and birth of the moveable type of the next millennium.

10:08Thank you.