Salzburg: The 3rd Geodesign Summit Europe was held last week in Salzburg, Austria co-hosted by University of Salzburg, VU University Amsterdam, Geodan and Esri. The two-day Summit featured inspiring keynotes focusing on geodesign frameworks and concepts and geospatial technologies supporting geodesign and decision-making. In his opening speech, Jack Dangermond, CEO, Esri, emphasized that maps and geography are becoming a language that cut across different discipline and culture. Contents, analytics tools and processing power are now widely available for the community to engage and understand our changing world. "Geodesign is a need since experimenting with real world is too expensive compared to digital world. Although geodesign leverages a Digital Earth framework made possible by various sensors and automation, the assessment and evaluation scenarios for alternative futures should come from the people.’ Indeed, the term ‘collaboration’ and ‘citizen engagement’ came up at multiple occasions throughout the summit," stated Prof. Josef Strobl, Interfaculty Department of Geoinformatics, University of Salzburg
City councils are utilizing geodesign tools to communicate with citizens for future development of cities as demonstrated by City of Gothenburg, Sweden; City of Cologne, Germany; City of Zurich, Switzerland as well as Salzburg, the host city itself. Another interesting application of geodesign is gaming. Eduardo Dias from VU Amsterdam/Geodan presented the result of participatory design workshops involving school children in Netherlands to co-design their surrounding school space using a popular sandbox game, Minecraft. Such activities help generate spatial thinking among children who after all will be the future spatial planners.
The Norwegian National Mapping Agency too has been organizing annual hackatons for schoolchildren to play with 3D model of their hometowns and create development project in the digital world via Minecraft. The two-day summit demonstrated the dynamics of geodesign as problem-solving and decision-making tool. Geodesign is no longer ‘just GIS’, it has cut across much bigger spectrum offering solutions in designing our complex world.
Source: Our Correspondent
