00:01Well, it's really wonderful to be here.

00:03I was in the planning meetings of this summit, and...and it's really Jack's vision and a lot of hard work of people like Diana...

00:11...and Juan Carlos and Mike Goodchild and many others who have made this possible.

00:15So it's an honor to be here.

00:18As Jack said, I think that we are at the beginning of what I see as a new field, what many of us see as a new field.

00:25And I think that questions and conversations we have in the next few days will really help us define what it is exactly.

00:32Thought I would start by giving you my sense of what it is.

00:35And then also, since I'm coming from the design side, not the GIS side...

00:39...I thought I would also convey to you some of the issues that we're concerned about in the design community...

00:44...that we think GeoDesign can really help with and...

00:48...and help define, perhaps, research agendas for this new field.

00:53As Jack said, GeoDesign is sort of the coming together of geography, the study of the earth and distribution of life on it...

01:02...the geospatial technologies, which look at spatial software and the analytics related to that...

01:09...coming together with design, which as the computer scientist Herb Simon defines it...

01:14...is the transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones.

01:18So one of the things that the design community is often interested in is not just making things look attractive...

01:24...which tends to be the popular impression of what designers do...

01:28...but actually make things work in the world and improve that function.

01:32And as I think you'll see in a moment...

01:34...I want to make an argument that the design community hasn't been doing necessarily a very good job related to that...

01:39...particularly when it gets to issues of sustainability and social justice.

01:43GeoDesign, I think, brings together two fields, both of have spatial thinking at their core.

01:50Spatial thinking, spatial analysis, the spatial allocation of information and resources, human activities; we share that.

01:58That is something that binds us together.

02:01To me, what's also interesting about GeoDesign is it has a powerful temporal side to it...

02:06...which is that geography is a social science that looks at the way the world is and the way the world was.

02:17Design is a field that looks at the way the world could be.

02:21So GeoDesign is bringing together temporally two fields, one of which looks at the world from the past up to the present...

02:27...the other one looks sort of from the present out to the future.

02:30And therein lies, I think, its capacity to enable us to address problems that we haven't been very good at addressing up to now.

02:41So, for example, as a social science, geography/geospatial thinking is analytical, it's empirical, and it's inductive.

02:51In contrast, design is a field that is prospective, looking out ahead; it's imaginative, and it's abductive...

03:02...a word that you'll hear a little bit more about in this conference, which is a way of thinking...

03:07...actually, it's an idea as old as our thinking about induction and deduction...

03:12...which is about making lateral connections among seemingly disparate and disconnected things, finding new connections.

03:19In some ways, I think GeoDesign itself is a kind of creative bringing together of two fields...

03:24...which have been kept separate and are now coming together.

03:28But I think, since I'm not a GIS scientist, I thought that it might be most useful in my comments to talk about...

03:35...what are some of the problems we see from the design community that GeoDesign can help with.

03:41And I think I would start by saying that, from the design community's perspective, a lot of what we have been designing in the world...

03:50...our cities, our human settlements, our buildings, our landscapes...

03:53...have been designed without a lot of information about the consequences of our actions...

03:58...the consequences of what we're doing on other species, on distant populations, on future generations.

04:06So as a community, the design community's focused very much on the immediate needs of clients and communities in the present.

04:13And yet we've been having an enormous impact on the planet way beyond what we have data to understand.

04:21And as GeoDesign can bring data to bear on those design decisions, it will profoundly change the way we live and the way we inhabit the planet.

04:33And so I think that from that I would like to make the argument...

04:38...that because we've been designing the world without this data-rich knowledge of consequences...

04:45...we've created a situation in which we have made ourselves, as a species, rather vulnerable on the planet...

04:52...which to me gives a kind of urgency to GeoDesign. This is not something we have a lot of time to develop.

04:59If we don't develop these tools and start enacting them, we ourselves are going to be increasingly threatened.

05:05And this gets to my first point, which is an idea that Thomas Freedman and others...

05:10...such as the faculty member at University of Washington, David Barash, have made...

05:14...which is to make the argument that we have basically created an enormous Ponzi scheme with the planet.

05:20That humans have developed a scheme over the last several hundred years in which we suck resources...

05:28...and exploit labor around the planet in order to maintain ourselves.

05:33And as we know, from Madoff, Ponzi schemes cannot be sustained.

05:39They eventually run off the planet, as this diagram shows.

05:43And that's exactly what's happened. We are now off the planet.

05:47It takes more than one earth to sustain ourselves at our current population and levels of consumption...

05:53...let alone the exponential growth that we are in.

05:57Now, for...as objectionable of what Madoff did, he really will, I think, be historically recognized for doing two things.

06:06He helped us realize that if you make the Ponzi scheme big enough, two things happen.

06:11One, it is something that it becomes very difficult to see, and it also is something that we want to deny is occurring.

06:24We have so much invested in the world as it is that we don't want to recognize that, in fact, we can't sustain it.

06:32So one of the ways in which the design community thinks about Ponzi schemes...

06:38...is what an engineer would call a fracture-critical system.

06:42And to give you a sense of what that is, this is a photo of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis...

06:47...which was a fracture-critical bridge structure.

06:50And fracture-critical systems are such that they've taken all of the redundancy out of the system.

06:55They've become so efficient that if any one part fails, the entire structure collapse catastrophically.

07:03And I want to make the argument that that is a metaphor for the world we have designed for ourselves...

07:11...that this is not an isolated experience. In fact, this is the infrastructure upon which we are now living.

07:17And that's why we have to take these issues seriously.

07:20Had engineers had a strain gauge on the gusset plate on this bridge that cracked...

07:26...they would've seen a curve very much like this, which is that, as stresses increase in a fracture-critical system...

07:33...they at the very end increase exponentially just prior to failure.

07:38And so one of the things we have to start watching for are these exponential increases of stress on systems...

07:45...because that is where the next failures are going to occur, the next catastrophic collapses.

07:51And so let me go through some of them...

07:53...because I think that this is where you begin to define what the research agenda for GeoDesign could be.

08:00One of them is the exponential increase in extinctions going on on the planet.

08:06As many of you know, biologists like, such as E. O. Wilson, have talked about us being in the midst of the sixth extinction...

08:13...where two-thirds of all bird, mammal, butterfly, and plant species are expected to be extinct by the end of this century.

08:21This is a profound phenomenon that we are in the midst of. And much of this has to do with the fact that we have...

08:30...and here's some graphing of the kind of exponential decline in the health of species around the planet...

08:39...including diagrams such as this, which show, for example, global fisheries totally collapsing by 2050.

08:48And this has a lot to do with the way we have spatially inhabited our planet, that much of this has to do with polluting...

08:55...fragmenting the landscape, and introducing invasive species across it.

09:03So the way in which we have been designing our landscapes has directly related to the collapse of a number of these ecosystems.

09:12And GeoDesign, I think, has the great potential to help us understand this phenomenon...

09:18...and make design decisions that work counter to it, that, in fact, preserve habitat, connect habitat...

09:27...preserve the resources that other species need in order for them to survive and, with their survival, for us to survive.

09:35Another obvious exponential increase has been carbon accumulation in the atmosphere...

09:41...which has been triggering global climate change.

09:45And it...and here too, much of the greenhouse gas emission from humans comes from human settlements, from buildings...

09:52...from transportation systems, from the geographical spread in which we now live which has contributed to this problem...

10:02...and, over the last many hundred thousands of years...

10:06...are clearly out of sync with any kind of cyclical rise and fall of carbon in the atmosphere.

10:15And so here too, I think GeoDesign has great potential to enable us to begin to make design decisions...

10:23...that are zero carbon in production, that use renewable technologies...

10:30...and that begin to turn the tide on something that, if we don't...

10:34...will be incredibly disruptive to our food supplies, our water supplies, and to much of what we depend on.

10:44There are, though, fracture-critical threats to us which go beyond the environment.

10:49And this too is something that I think GeoDesign can very much help with.

10:54For example, we designed a fracture-critical finance system...

11:00...where we designed financial products such that we increased debt on our financial system...

11:07...to the point where a few investment banks go down...

11:10...and they bring the entire global financial community down with it.

11:13It's a classic kind of catastrophic collapse of a fracture-critical system as a result of poorly designed financial products.

11:22And there was a spatial component to this, which is that the banks did...literally did not know where the debt lies.

11:29They...many of them still don't know who's holding what debt.

11:32So we...it's a case of designing products that are so poorly designed, they're toxic even to the people who designed them.

11:40They brought down the very banks that invented them.

11:43And they still don't know where the toxins lie and...

11:47So here too, I think GeoDesign can actually help us understand the flows of money...

11:53...the flows of resources spatially across the planet, and help us understand...

11:57...when we're putting ourselves in positions of threat, such as the ones we have encountered.

12:02And also, of course, one of the key factors in this collapse has been, as this diagram shows...

12:09...the exponential increase in housing prices in which we are now in the process of collapsing back down.

12:16Much of this has, as well, to do with the ways in which we have designed our own housing developments in this country...

12:24...which is that, in the name of efficiency, we thought that this is the way in which people want to live and should live.

12:30It's quick to build, it's easy to sell.

12:33But as it turns out, these sort of developments are incredibly fracture critical.

12:38In other words, if enough houses foreclose in communities like this...

12:42...they bring all of the prices of all the other houses that are nearly identical down to the same point.

12:47And as a result, you have large percentages of the American population whose mortgages our now underwater...

12:54...where the prices have collapsed, they're paying more on their mortgage than their house is now worth.

12:58And it has direct relationship to the ways in which we designed monoculture-like housing developments after World War II...

13:06...that lacked any kind of economic resilience as well as environmental resilience.

13:14And so part of this is, you know, How can GeoDesign help us design communities that are more socioeconomically diverse...

13:22...more architecturally diverse, more environmentally diverse...

13:25...that in fact enable us to withstand the potential collapses such as we're encountering?

13:36As well as understanding how zoning and other public policies have contributed to this.

13:42And I can go on. Our electrical grid system is fracture critical; we know that it is quite vulnerable to brownouts, blackouts.

13:52There are six transmission stations in the country, any one of which were attacked by terrorists could bring large sectors of the economic...

14:00...of the electrical grid in this country down.

14:03We have a fracture-critical transportation system, highly dependent on oil.

14:09And here again, I think one of the ways in which GeoDesign can help us understand are the impacts of some of these issues...

14:18...such as what does it mean to have...to be at or near peak oil?

14:23And how do we begin to design multimodal forms of transportation...

14:28...rethinking even the need to move so many people around, so many goods around.

14:33Are there other fuel sources and other settlement patterns that make us less vulnerable to the exponential increase in price...

14:43...as well as the exponential decrease in the availability of inexpensive oil that we are right at the...in the midst of.

14:52And...and begin to learn...

14:54Actually one of the things about this research is you begin to find that some of the answers to these are actually old answers...

15:00...things that we used to know how to do and that we have forgotten.

15:05As Bill McKibben says, "We live in this age of information and great forgetfulness."

15:09We've forgotten a lot of what we used to know and what we used to do.

15:13And so, to me, one of the interesting outcomes of some of this research may be in the process of rediscovering.

15:20And a couple areas that I think are also really affecting all of us, one of which is the...

15:29...the fact we have a fracture-critical food system.

15:31We are now dependent on four plants for a large percentage of our calories.

15:35Disease in any one of those plants could bring famine around the world.

15:42We also are in the midst, as many of us know, of kind of exponentially increasing shortage of water...

15:51...and where demand is far outstripping our reserves.

15:55Again, here are research areas where GeoDesign can not only assess the problem...

16:00...but help us understand how we design and locate and allocate resources; locate people...

16:07...think about human settlements in ways that can overcome the highly efficient, highly interconnected...

16:16...and highly fracture-critical systems that we've been putting in place over the last 50, 60 years particularly...

16:26...although some of this goes back several hundreds of years.

16:30And begin to use some of the geospatial technologies that we have that go back as far as Ian McHarg, and others...

16:37...to begin to reexamine what land we use for what.

16:41And the work that's been going on in sustainable sites, and others, are great starting points for that research.

16:47But I think the most worrisome exponential increase of all is this one, which is world population.

16:55And in a way, you could argue that this is behind all the other stresses that we're seeing on the planet...

17:00...which is the idea that it took humans all of human history to get to two billion people...

17:06...and in a hundred years, from 1950 to 2050, we'll go from two billion to nine billion people.

17:12We are a completely out-of-control species. We are the weed species on the planet.

17:17And we are the major invasive species.

17:20And so I think that coming to terms with the fact that we are the problem...it is us...and what do we do about this.

17:27Because the worrisome thing about this is when you talk to ecologists...

17:32...when they see an increase like this of any species in an ecosystem...

17:37...there's only, almost...almost invariably one result. The species collapses.

17:41And we don't want that to happen, obviously, that...

17:44But the urgency of this, that this is not just something that we have to think about as an incremental change...

17:51...this is a ticking time bomb, and it is...it is all of us.

17:55And it is not something that will just happen in Africa or Asia.

17:59One pandemic disease, carried through our transportation system, will immediately affect all of us...

18:06...and is probably one of the greatest threats to an exponential increase in our numbers such as this.

18:13So how does, then, GeoDesign help with that?

18:19I think one of the things about it is that it can begin to help us understand how we will allocate ourselves in cities...

18:28...how we will think about human settlements in ways that are more resilient...

18:34...and come to grips with the fact that if we are going to sustain our population on the planet...

18:40...we have to have a fundamentally different relationship with the natural world...

18:45...or that we will ourselves be one of the species that's part of the sixth extinction.

18:51And these are issues that none of us like to face up to, we don't like to talk about.

18:57They are, though, the core issues that are driving a lot of the design community.

19:01And it's one reason why the design community is so eager to work with the GIS community on developing these tools.

19:09We have got to begin to make decisions about how we allocate ourselves and how we allocate resources...

19:14...in ways that address these threats that really are in front of all of us.

19:22One of the things we can learn about, with all of this, is the way in which ecosystems collapse.

19:29Some of you may know the work of Buzz Hollings at Florida...

19:32...and the work he's done with others on panarchy and the Resilience Institute.

19:37A lot of their work has shown that as ecosystems collapse...

19:41...largely because there is a increasing efficiency, particularly of a few species in the ecosystem...

19:49...there's an increasing connectiveness within the ecosystem...

19:53...but all redundancy and resilience from the ecosystem has been removed.

19:59And so an ecosystem collapse is an adaptive cycle, as Hollings and others would argue, back to resiliency.

20:07But it brings two other pieces to it. It brings a change in the way in which the ecosystem is efficient...

20:16...and it actually decreases the interconnectedness of them.

20:20And so those are some, I would argue, design principles...

20:23...that we have to actually start to think about as we think about our inhabitation of the planet.

20:31Here is a adaptive cycle from that work on panarchy...

20:36...which sort of shows how ecologists have seen how ecosystems rise and fall...

20:44...and I think one of the questions for us is to sort of question the idea that...

20:49...we often assume is that we are on some endlessly increasing line of progress.

20:55That in fact, as a human ecosystem, we in fact may be in the midst of an adaptive cycle very much like this...

21:01...that all other species go through, plant and animal.

21:04And that...how do we begin to address the fact that we may be on that upper curve of...

21:11...about to sort of reestablish resiliency as one of the key variables and key values that we need to pursue.

21:22And I think GeoDesign plays a key role in this transition by making global data available to us...

21:28...helping us see consequences, not only locally but globally in our design decisions...

21:34...providing the design community real-time data so that we can make data-rich decisions...

21:41...are all aspects of this new field that will be vitally important.

21:47I think also the idea of GeoDesign empowering ordinary people. As Jack was saying, we live in this age of mobile technology.

21:56How can we bring this information not only to the hands of experts...

22:00...but in the hands of everybody so that as we make day-to-day decisions...

22:04...Do I drive to get that quart of milk, or do I walk? Do I, you know, water my lawn, or do I let it go native?

22:13I mean, there are just myriad decisions that GeoDesign empowered people can begin to change their behavior...

22:22...at a level that will be, I think, fundamental to our ability to begin to deal with some of the fracture-critical threats that we face.

22:33And I think that...let me just end here, because I would love to hear some of your thoughts about some of this...

22:42...with some work that has been coming out of the ecology community.

22:49This is a diagram that Jeffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute has been developing...

22:56He's a geophysicist; you may know some of his work on sort of scaling.

23:04He's been finding sort of universal scaling laws that apply across plant and animal communities.

23:08He's also starting to look at urban settlements, human settlements, in terms of these scaling techniques.

23:14One of the interesting discoveries he's made is that there's a constant relationship...

23:19...between the mass and metabolism of all plants and animals on the planet...

23:24...with one exception, which is humans.

23:26Via technology, we now have the metabolism, or the energy absorption needs, of a blue whale.

23:34So one way to think about the stresses that are on the planet is that we now live on a planet...

23:41...with six and a half billion blue whales, which is us.

23:42We are driving other species off the planet...

23:45...and we ourselves are threatened because the planet may not be big enough for that many blue whales.

23:50So one of the interesting design challenges which GeoDesign can help us with...

23:54...is how do we bring our mass-metabolism ratio back into alignment with what it used to be?

24:01I mean, humans lived on this planet for thousands and thousands of years within the mass-metabolism ratio of all other species.

24:10It's only been in the last few hundred years that we are way out of line.

24:15And so we need to redesign the world and redesign our daily lives in ways that we stop absorbing so much energy...

24:23...and run all the other species, or so many other species, off the planet and potentially ourselves with it.

24:29But this is another diagram that Jeffrey West's group has developed, which is looking...

24:36He too is concerned about these exponential increases, these curves that we are on...

24:41...on water, on food, on energy, on carbon accumulation, on population. We are on so many of them.

24:49And that's the sort of diagram shown by number 1.

24:52He argues that what we need to prevent catastrophic collapse, such as what would happen with number 2, is innovation.

25:02And so innovation is the series of sort of sculpted increases here...

25:07...which are that through innovation we can sort of rethink the way in which we inhabit the planet...

25:17...we can rethink the use of resources, and prolong our ability to sustain ourselves on a planet such as the one we're on.

25:28I think, to me, and these kinds of points, number 3, number 6, are these sort of moments of innovation...

25:37...where there's a profound paradigm shift in the way in which we occupy the planet.

25:42I think GeoDesign is one of them. I think it actually has that potential...

25:46...that it can be one of these tools that through the proper use of it, we can...

25:52...begin to reestablish a different relationship with our settlement patterns, with our relationship to nature...

25:58...and prolong our ability to sustain so many billions of people on this planet.

26:04So GeoDesign, its time has come, I think, and it's none too soon. So thank you.