Geodesign

Geodesign is a method for integrating design professionals, design technologies, and a variety of stakeholders to address geographic-scale problems that are outpacing the capabilities of any single initiative in public and/or private situations.

Current practice is not on schedule to prevent widespread dislocation from today’s geographic-scale challenges, which include precipitous climate change, large-scale species extinction, global epidemics, buildup of human toxins, and fundamental infrastructure changes as cities and transportation networks reconfigure themselves in a future in which oil is scarce.

Geodesign Goals

For that reason, Geodesign involves both technical integration and interdisciplinary integration in order to:

Provide a global perspective of the consequence to designs of all scales, from single buildings, to landscape planning, to transportation networks, to national policy frameworks.
Provide information and analysis to feedback the environmental, social, and economic costs of local decisions.
Express our connection to distant populations, to other species, and our cost on global resources.
Integrate concerns across the separate disciplines--architecture, zoning, ecology, finance, policy, and law -- in a transactional process that allows them to evolve rapidly together.
Integrate social networks, crowd-sourcing, and collaborative technology and practice so that scientific thinking and technical fact influence both design and human behavior.
Connect citizens to their government, influence technology and public policy, and create a purposeful process of designing the future rather than simply reacting to it.
Evolve a visual language of storytelling that will touch people’s hearts and minds and make transformation a reality.

Geodesign Principles

The Geodesign methodology looks to address the change model of collaboration to provide early feedback and substantive communication. Towards that end, Geodesign principles include the following.

Use a Pareto principle of transparency to communicate the consequences and models for key design constraints – such as energy, trapped carbon, and transportation costs – to other scales of design and other disciplines early in the design and feedback process.
Concentrate not on simply extending existing GIS, BIM, or Web technologies and standards, but on the handoff of meaningful wisdom and rules of thumb between them. For instance, the dialog between a BIM model and the landscape may most meaningfully involve zoning criteria, traffic load, or energy produced by the building’s solar plant rather than purely spatial or graphic criteria.
Drive static map and design technology from isolated islands of automation to collaborative social environments that invite public design, deepen collaboration, and evolve public policy to keep pace with the technology and challenges.
Assemble social networks of those concerned with conservation, energy reduction, and sustainable design as these can often work faster as proactive communities of interest than government can as a reactive force.
Rapidly improve computing, networks, software, and interfaces to take them from the isolated realm of design or technology specialists to powerful tools to improve the level of effectiveness of all in the community.
Use a service-oriented approach in the most communal sense; that is, think first of what information, analysis, or service your discipline can offer to make others more effective in their own efforts, rather than thinking first of what capabilities or authority your own discipline wishes to co opt.