Integrating Geography with the Design Process Lets Us Truly "Design with Nature"

In his groundbreaking 1969 book Design with Nature, Ian McHarg advocated a framework for design that helps humans achieve synergy with nature. McHarg's pioneering work not only had a fundamental influence on the up-and-coming field of environmental planning but simultaneously solidified the core concepts of the young field of GIS technology as well.
 
A better world is the common goal that all of us - geographers, planners, scientists and others - have been striving for. In the 40 years since McHarg's book was written, we've come a long way in understanding the design, engineering, analysis, and management of complex earth systems, but we still have much work to do. The key to developing a true understanding of our dynamic earth is creating a framework to take many different pieces of past and future data from a variety of sources and merge them in a single system. GIS is a sophisticated tool already in widespread use by planners, engineers and scientists to display and analyze all forms of location-referenced data about the health, status, and history of our planet.

GIS: Designing Our Future was the theme of the 2009 ESRI International User Conference. When Jack talks of designing our future, he believes that combining the wealth of data available about our world with sophisticated analysis and management tools is the prescription for understanding and shaping the future of our planet - a future where advances in human society and technology are designed in close collaboration with nature resulting in the best of possible future worlds. It's a huge task and a delicate balance, for sure, but with help from GIS and géodesign tools, we readily accept that challenge.

Imagine that your initial design concept, scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin, has the full power of GIS behind it: the sketch goes into the database, becoming a layer that can be compared to all the other layers in the database. With the new design tools in ArcGIS 9.4, you will begin to appreciate the power that can be derived by associating drawing tools, symbology, data models, and process models into one integrated framework for doing geodesign. Having "back of the napkin" design sketches available for immediate analysis and feedback will be one of ESRI's primary areas of research and development in the coming years, and our users will be leveraging the results of these efforts in upcoming releases.

And the need for such tools has never been greater. People are starting to understand human domination on the earth and want to act in more natural and sustainable ways. A géodesign framework provides GIS professionals with a robust set of tools for designing our future.