GeoDesign Summit 2012 — A New Direction

January 9, 2012 5 Comments

In all fairness to my previous post, I want to share some GeoDesign links. The feedback I’m getting from those who attended is that it has become an education type initiative, rather than working toward changing how we actually do work. I guess bottom up change works sometimes, but these kids graduating with “GeoDesign emphasis” have no chance at changing how established companies are doing business. So here you go if you want to try to figure out what was discussed:

The GeoDesign Little Red Book is ready to teach a generation of students what won't work in the commercial sector.

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Let’s Call Esri’s ArcGIS Online What It Is — A Spade

January 6, 2012 42 Comments

So the Esri GeoDesign Summit is in full session, or at least we know it is because at least two people showed up.  Matt (one of the lucky two) showcases the latest Esri initiatives being demonstrated at Esri’s shindig.

Bernie Szukalski, product strategist and technical evangelist at Esri, spoke today at the GeoDesign Summit about ArcGIS Online initiatives and coming capabilities. Web mapping has morphed from sharing maps and geospatial information to a geospatial content management system that supports collaboration. The new iteration allows for the publication and sharing with others, as well as the access to rich global base data through cloud services.

So yea, da cloud roxxorz!  We’ve all tried to figure out what ArcGIS Online is (beyond the kitchen sink of Esri’s cloud), but this week it’s content management.

Maps can be shared with others by making them publicly available, sharing a link or embedding in a website or blog. Additional content can be found via the gallery where maps are vetted by the community, with ratings and comments. These maps contain documentation with details regarding the source, providing metadata that allows you to understand how they were created. There is also flexibility in how these intelligent maps can be accessed, with options to open in your desktop, open in Explorer Online, and in the map viewer.

If you dropped off the turnip truck, you probably like most of the paragraph.  Sounds like a nice open shared world, where everyone wins.  But the last sentence leads to the truth about ArcGIS Online and their vision of content management.  Flexibility in the sense that if you’ve standardized on Esri’s suite of ArcGIS products, you can share their proprietary formats.  Things like ArcGIS Server, File Geodatabases, Layer files and the rest are not formats we can share with the world.

C'mon people now, Smile on your brother; Ev'rybody get together, Try and love Esri right now

Lets look at it this way, SharePoint is Microsoft’s Content Management System.  Imagine if Microsoft only allowed you to upload Microsoft file formats.  Crazy right?  But that is what ArcGIS Online is.  Sure you can upload shapefiles, but those really are so limited you can’t really store data in them.  There is a reason why nobody uses DBF anymore.  No, you have to use Layer Packages, MXDs, etc to get any “value” out of ArcGIS Online.  It is a little better on the server-side, Esri supports WMS (probably so they can check off OGC support in some contracts), but nothing else.  ArcGIS Online is what it is, an Esri Content Management System that lets you share Esri files with other Esri users.

I don’t fault Esri for creating such a product, they feel there is money to be made doing this.  But let’s not pretend it is a GIS content management system because it just doesn’t support open standards let alone other formats such as TAB, DWG or whatever Intergraph is doing these days.  It is an Esri Content Management System.

But what does that really mean?  Basically Esri’s ArcGIS Online is Google My Maps, but with $10,000 client software.  Creating a map to share with Esri’s online APIs doesn’t make it content management.  There is no geneology of data, no lifecycle to the product.  Just some simple polygons or pushpins on a map that at its core isn’t what customers want.  The biggest reason why Esri is pushing ArcGIS Online so much is that Google Earth Builder is a direct play toward some vision that Esri has to where GIS may go in 2012/2013.

The problem with both solutions is that they don’t actually manage your data that goes into your products (the pushpin maps you share during GIS Day 2012).  The important data is still strewn across hard drives and servers in your organization just hoping that it will never get lost.   That doesn’t sound like progress to me and the focus is not on workflows but some mythical federal contract that the big boys are fighting over.

Cutting edge maps have pushpins on them.

 

UPDATE: Looks like I missed Sean McGinnis’ take on ArcGIS.com a couple weeks ago.

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Wacom Inkling — Could be Just What Designers Need

November 30, 2011 5 Comments

So what exactly is the Wacom Inkling?  Many in our space are familiar with the Adapx pen which allows for capturing forms and other simple data inputs from special paper.  The Inkling is sort of the right brain answer to the left brain Adapx.  So what exactly does the Inkling do and why would I pay $199 for it?

Simply put, Wacom designed the Inkling to be a digitizer that works on any piece of paper.  That’s a huge difference from the Adapx pen which requires their special paper with dots on it.  This means the Wacom pen can be used like an “ordinary” pen.  Draw what you want and there it is.  This is great for designers, but it means that the Adapx pen and the Wacom Inkling are after two different markets.  There is no OCR or other recognition software, it just captures what you write as lines (heck, these are vectors baby!).

The Wacom Inkling has a very nice travel case that contains everything you need to use the pen.

So what do you get with the Inkling?  The case that the Inkling comes in does a great job of holding all the pieces together and charges the pen and receiver when plugged into a USB port using the included cable.  The pen itself is a tad thinker than I’m used to which means that id doesn’t always feel quite right in my hand.  But for GeoDesign type applications, it is probably going to work out fine (think of writing with a sharpie size pen).  It takes regular ink refills which is great in that it isn’t going to cost you, but the thickness was greater than I’m normally used to.  I suppose you could get different refills, but I didn’t test that out.

The Inkling Receiver clips on to any piece of paper.

The Inkling Receiver clips on to your paper and uses some sort of infrared connectivity to figure out where the pen is.  You can see the infrared beam area at the bottom of the receiver in the picture above.  Yes, this means that if you put your hand in front of that beam, the pen becomes lost.  It quickly rediscovers it, but you’ll want to keep that in mind while drawing.  The other important fact about the receiver is that it only works on paper 8.5×11 inches or smaller.  That means you can’t clip it on to some huge ANSI E plot and start working, you have to make smaller plots to work with.

You clip the receiver to the top of the paper and start writing.

As you can see in the picture above, you clip the receiver on the paper and just start working with it.  The green light blinks as you draw showing that it is getting data from the pen.  There are two buttons on the receiver, the left one is a power button, but the right one is much more interesting.  It is a layer button.  You can start drawing, click that button and then work on a new layer.  These layers are compatible with Illustrator and Photoshop (more later).

Once you are done drawing, you unclip the receiver and plug it into a mini USB cable.  The one included with the unit was short, so I used a longer cable that I had in a drawer.  This shows up as a USB flash device and includes software that Wacom includes to download and convert the drawings.

The Sketch Manager could be the weakest link to the package.

The Sketch Manager is used to transfer the sketches off the receiver and into formats that you can use.  Unlike the well hardware, the software feels like a bad Windows 95 application.  It is confusing and menus options seem randomly tossed around where you least expect it.  The sketch manager recognizes Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and puts some export buttons at the top to make it easy to get sketches in to those applications.  The problem with this is that you need Adobe installed to export to AI.  You can’t save as these formats, it does some sort of OLE thing where the vectors just show up in the application.

You can see the layers in this sketch.

But don’t be too sad about true EPS/AI support missing.  It does support SVG export (as well as PDF and the regular raster exports such as jpg/tiff) which means you can get those vectors out and into applications that use it.  I was able to export out the sketch into SVG and then upload it to my personal WeoGeo Library where I could then work with it how ever I needed it.  The SVG was able to be imported to Illustrator, ArcGIS Desktop and other applications that support SVG without issue.  This means that you can make edits with your pen on paper and then bring those back into your digital tools for fine tuning.

So here are the export options, don't look for Illustrator, Photoshop or Autodesk Sketchbook Pro

I’m no artist, but I have spent many times in the past 20 years marking up output from GIS systems using a pen on paper.  From this perspective, I think the Wacom Inkling shines.  Designers and planners love to sketch by hand and then expect others to convert that to digital maps.  I can see putting and Inkling in all their hands so that I can just grab the SVG output and bring it into my software.  There are limitations of course, you can’t use anything bigger than 8.5×11 inch paper, the pen is a tad large, the ink is not fine enough; but I was able to start working with the pen immediately and produce great results without any problems.  The price of the pen is reasonable considering other options (including digitizer tablets) and since it takes ordinary ink refills, future costs should stay low.

I come from a design/planning background and I can’t tell you how much I would have loved to have a pen like this years ago.  I’ve handed it to architects and planners and had them produce output that went right into projects with minimal editing.  That really puts a smile on your face and produces great work that normally would have had to be digitized on-screen.  I can totally see Wacom produce a line of Inkling products like they have with their Bamboo line.  But for now, if you ever mark up maps or other documents and wish to get those lines into Adobe Illustrator or Esri ArcGIS, the Inkling is clearly the way to go.

Other reviews (including videos) of the Wacom Inking:

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Where I Lose My Mind Thinking About GeoDesign

January 20, 2011 12 Comments

There is no such thing as a GeoDesigner

To understand what GeoDesign is you have to drop any ideas of it being a profession. Yes that means you don’t have to worry about little Timmy growing up to be a GeoDesigner. I sat for almost a day listening to people argue about an ontology for us to argue about a definition about GeoDesign. Yea, you read that right, ontology has been added to the list of drinking words at any GeoDesign summit.

After that first day I was a little shaken by what I saw but a night’s sleep clears the mind. People arguing about ontologies are only concerned about either writing about GeoDesign or teaching it. The 99.999% of the rest of us can move on and not worry about such minutia as the term “dashboard”[ref]I think the point was calling a website information panel a “dashboard” is offensive to dashboards[/ref] being offensive.

That all said, we all agreed that there is nothing called a GeoDesigner and we all took a blood oath to never let such a job be created.

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the GeoDesign Room!

What’s The Point Then?

OK, so “we” reject the idea of creating an ontology[ref]Ontologies are irrelevant in the age of a Google search. Chew on that thought for a while.[/ref] and the idea that we can all go back to school and get our MA in GeoDesign. Why did I bother going to the GeoDesign summit anyway? Clearly I’ve got better things to do the first week of the year than spend it in Redlands, right?

Clearly no. I’ve said again and again that the Geography needs to be a deeper part of all planning. Sure we’ve all been “doing GeoDesign” since man could first pick up a stick and drew up where the dinosaurs lived so they wouldn’t be eaten[ref]At least that is what The Flintstones taught me about history.[/ref]. Place is critical to any planning and thus whether you are a GeoDesign believer or GeoDesign agnostic, you have to give me the point, “place matters”.  Thus, the concepts of GeoDesign matter even if calling it that makes your skin crawl.

Let Us Stop Making Things Complicated

What concerns me about GeoDesign though is that many of the people defining what it is or isn’t seem to live by the theory, complex problems require complex solutions. I don’t know about any of you, but my life and job are complex enough without “design strategies” defined on high. I want simple solutions to my problems because those are the ones that are implemented. Complex ones get stuffed in binders and put on a bookshelf[ref]Yup, I’m pissed my hard work over the years with planners has spent most of it’s time on the shelf.[/ref]. Time to make that stop!

A Way Forward?

Part of why I didn’t rush out and write about what I saw and heard at the 2011 GeoDesign Summit is that I’m not sure the details of what happened matter. GeoDesign 2011 is in the past and it probably was a good outcome as a second summit. There was some interesting talks, but nothing that I really wanted to jump up and say “Yes!”. What was sorely needed was someone showing how they are going to use “geo” and “design” together in the future. I think we’ve grown beyond proving we all have been doing GeoDesign for years and show how we are going to design[ref]Big “D” or little “d” design; I’m pretty sure I’m making a joke there but I guess you had to be there.[/ref] in the coming months, years, decades. There is all this big talk about GeoDesign being able to save humanity from ourselves but we continue to show work we did years ago. Aren’t we better than that?

If we commit to using Geo with Design, think about where we’ll be in 2001!

[/references]

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Off to the 2011 GeoDesign Summit

January 3, 2011 13 Comments

Just like last year, I’m headed off to the GeoDesign Summit to start the year. I’m looking forward to hearing how things have changed in the 12 months since we last sat in Jack’s new building, but I’m not sure I’m that hopeful.

As with most things when you involve those in a University setting, it starts getting way too complicated to implement in the real world (and by real word I mean a situation where you don’t have grad students to implement your every whim). For GeoDesign to be embraced in workflows, it needs to get more zen and more pragmatic. We’ll have to see if there is more engagement from the private sector this year to keep GeoDesign from falling into just something you learn in College and never use again (like Shakespearian Literature).

I’ve been prototyping using WeoGeo in GeoDesign workflows and I think there is some really great ways we can use hosted GIS services to help get faster feedback on designs.

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GeoDesign Friday

November 5, 2010 4 Comments

Looking for something besides damnyouautocorrect.com for your Friday distraction? A couple interesting GeoDesign links are below for distraction.

First up is a new e-book from Esri called, “Changing Geography by Design: Selected Readings in GeoDesign“. As expensive as that title is, it is available as a free PDF from ESRI. And don’t worry, Carl Steinitz‘s work is way back in the Bibliography, so you can ignore his complicated University-think GeoDesign ideas (yea, works well at Harvard, but us mere mortals live in the real world).

The other is a video demonstrating some GeoDesign workflows to perform a suitability analysis. Cool stuff (though clearly an Esri exercise)…

Oh and Go Giants!

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Test Drive on the Wacom DTU-2231

July 8, 2010 4 Comments

I was lucky enough to get an opportunity to test out the Wacom DTU-2231 for the past couple weeks.  I’ve been seeing quite a bit of Wacom at the ESRI UC and other conferences and it would appear they are making a big push in the professional GIS world.  With ArcGIS 10, I couldn’t pass up the offer to give the Wacom DTU-2231 a try.

While the Wacom can be stood up like a monitor, it is best experienced laying flat (like a workspace).  This gives you an opportunity to lean on the device and work better with whatever apps you are using at the time.  I wasn’t sure at first about putting my hands on the monitor/tablet, but it feels so natural and it mimics how we used to work with cartography before GIS came along (yea, all that pen and paper stuff is coming back to me now).

The Wacom DTU-2231 on my desk

Now the monitor itself is crisp as anything I’ve seen and it runs at a native 1920×1080 giving it full HD resolution.  The maps just leap off of the page because they are so crisp.  The pen was something I wasn’t used to as previous tablets I’ve used had heavy pens that required to be put in a recharger when not in use.  This one has a battery-free pen which means the pen is lighter and you never have to worry about it not being available for use.  Once you get used to using a pen directly on a monitor, you never pick up the mouse again.  The pen is pressure sensitive, but I couldn’t tell if ArcGIS could tell (I’m sure it didn’t).  Other apps of course do take advantage of the pressure making it fun to work with.

Using the Wacom with ArcGIS 10 was my main goal.  ESRI’s new editing tools seem like they are meant to be used with tablets.  The freehand drawing capability really changes how you sketch out maps in ArcMap.  Since I came up through the “Planning” side of GIS, I’ve made more site plans than I care to recall.  Usually they are a result of someone drawing something on a map that you printed out and then you attempt to either scan that map back into ArcGIS or you draw it in unnaturally with your mouse.  The old adage, you can never have too many nodes usually means your arm feels like it will fall off making those curves.

But with this Wacom tablet, I was able to sketch directly on top of an aerial image, as well as let others sketch what they wanted to see on the map.  This meant that we worked directly inside my geodatabase speeding up my work.  Plus with the new template tools in ArcGIS 10, we were able to pick exactly the right kinds of symbology as we edited.

ArcMap is ready to go out of the box for use with the Wacom DTU-2231

Sketching a road freehand is a liberating experience!

The planner was able to put points down where she wanted them which in turn went directly into my geodatabase

Putting grassy areas down was as easy as drawing them on paper, but in this case they take on the properties of the geodatabase.

As I said above, the whole experience working with geospatial features with the tablet was liberating.  I’ve been frustrated for years by planners who ask from broad, smooth curves that by no fault of my right arm, cannot be drawn using a mouse.  The pen speeds up any editing of geodatabases and in turn gives results back to the planners quicker than we were able previously.  Not scanning in tracing paper or vellum into ArcGIS on its own probably pays for the unit itself.

Also the new editing functions of ArcGIS 10 are a huge change from how people have edited GIS data in any platform before. I’ve also said symbology was as important as the data itself for presenting and the template tools, the storage of these tools inside the geodatabase, all epic.

I’m looking forward to working with this Wacom tablet some more.  Its funny in that when I’m working on a computer that doesn’t have it attached, I get very frustrated now having to use a mouse.  If you are going to the ESRI UC next week, make sure to stop by the Wacom booth (Booth 2713) to see it in action and play around with it yourself.  I’ve heard ESRI will have a bunch of them around the exhibit hall and in sessions so I’m sure you’ll see it just about everywhere.

Ladies, do you want your GIS Analyst working with the Wacom DTU-2231? Of course you do! Swan Dive!

Note: Wacom provided the DTU-2231 to me for evaluation purposes.

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Submit a GeoDesign Lightning Talk at the 2010 ESRI User Conference

June 4, 2010 Leave a Comment

As expected, there is going to be a GeoDesign Track at the 2010 ESRI UC.  ESRI is going to be doing some more lightning talks like we did at the Developer Summit.  They were well attended and the presentations were a blast.  If you think you’d like to give the world you spin on GeoDesign, a 5 minute lightning talk is a perfect opportunity.

You can submit an abstract for your Lightning Talk by emailing it to ucgeodesign_external@esri.com.

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GeoDesign Idea Lab at the ESRI Developer Summit

March 8, 2010 6 Comments

A late edition to the ESRI Developer Summit is the [GeoDesign Idea Lab](http://gisandscience.com/2010/03/08/call-for-presentations-geodesign-idea-lab-at-the-esri-developer-summit-22-25-march-2010-palm-springs-california/). This is going to be a set of lightning talks by developers showcasing how they’ve been using the concept of GeoDesign in their applications. I’ll be moderating the session with Eric Wittner of ESRI. If you’ve been telling everyone you’ve “been doing GeoDesign for years”, now is you chance to get up and show everyone how your stuff is teh sexay.

Most of what we’ve seen out of this GeoDesign has been with researchers and university types talking about concepts. Now is the time to show how developers have been in the trenches integrating disparate disciplines and bringing the results to the decision makers and the public.

Email your Lightning Talk (10 minutes maximum) abstract to geodesign_devsum@esri.com to be considered. I’ll be blogging the session in detail so this could be a great opportunity to get your GeoDesign chops out in the open. Plus since it is going on at the same time as the Business Partner Conference expect some of the marketing geeks to drop by and see what is up.

[GeoDesign Idea Lab Part 1](http://events.esri.com/bpc/2010/dev_agenda/index.cfm?fa=Session_Detail_Form&SessionId=139&ScheduleId=245)
[GeoDesign Idea Lab Part 2](http://events.esri.com/bpc/2010/dev_agenda/index.cfm?fa=Session_Detail_Form&SessionId=140&ScheduleId=246)

![T.S. Elliott on GeoDesign](http://images.spatiallyadjusted.com/TSEliotatBlackboard.jpg)

_T.S. Elliott was doing GeoDesign before anyone else!_

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Thoughts on the GeoDesign Summit

January 9, 2010 26 Comments

I’m sure many of you have been following #geodesign on Twitter, but I thought I’d add some of my deeper thoughts.  First off, yes everyone in attendance realizes that we’ve all been doing this since the beginning of time.  GeoDesign wasn’t invented by anyone in particular, that was clear to everyone.

So I guess the next question what is GeoDesign and why do we need to even define it, especially if we’ve been doing this for years anyway?  Since we’ve all be already been doing this for years shouldn’t this be easy to define since we already have an understanding of it?  A Wikipedia entry has been started and I’d encourage everyone to take a look at it and refine it based upon your experiences.

I think a couple things helped bring so many people together from so many different disciplines.  With Architects, Planners, Engineers, Technologists, Researchers, Professors, Graduate Students and “other”; there was academia, government and private industry.  The one person in our industry that has the pull to get this done is of course Jack Dangermond.  He was also gracious enough to allow the organizers to use the new ESRI Q Building which was perfectly set up for a conference of this size.

Adena Schutzberg and Matt Ball both did a great job diving deep into the conference and it would be a good idea to read up on what was discussed and what needs to be done to move forward.  What I’m going to talk about is what I think came out of the Summit and what should be the next steps.

First off, there was a little push-back that was acknowledged at the Summit which seemed to revolve around the fact that some small group of people seemed to think they could take ownership of something everyone has been doing for years, GeoDesign.  I was also a little on edge about what might have come out from this Summit, but in the end it was unfounded. The group of folks from Michael Goodchild to Carl Steinitz all where very pragmatic about GeoDesign, how we involve more in the process of design (how crowdsourcing can be involved), to even deeper issues such as how we must fundamentally change how we as humans impact our environment.

Many showed examples of GeoDesign projects that they are currently work on to ones that were completed decades ago.  Also despite the Summit occurring on ESRI’s campus, there were many examples showed that included non-ESRI technology such as GRASS, Google Earth and SketchUp.  Jack also stood up on stage and hoped next year the organizers could include other software platforms and technologies that weren’t on stage this year.

So this brings up what to do next.  Where do we go from here.  Jack asked everyone in attendance if they thought we should move forward with the GeoDesign concept and everyone agreed we should.  The details on how were to do so was what we discussed Friday morning.  There will be a GeoDesign Summit next year.  Tom Fisher the Dean for the College of Design at University of Minnesota offered to host it there.  Given the warm weather though many though Redlands would be a great location to hold it again (Mid 70s in January is hard to beat).  Jack said that if the committee wanted to hold it at ESRI again he would offer up the facilities again.  Jack also said he wanted to unbrand the summit from ESRI and have it stand alone.  To do this the Summit will be moving off of the ESRI servers on to its own and engage other potential stakeholders.

Since there was so much content created and organized there was a discussion on how to best disseminate the data out to everyone.  This was probably the most contensious discussion.  On one had you have those who wanted to write books (grey hairs) and on the other there were those who wanted to set up a wiki and get more community involvement.  In the end it appears we will have both, a GeoDesign book you can get signed by your favorite GeoDesigner and a wiki the community can showcase their ideas and collaborate.

One problem is how to get this information out to the community at large.  Organizations such as the APA have the tools in place (and not ESRI branded) to facilitate getting the word out to their members.  Since there were many researchers present, there was also questions about how we can get funding in place from NSF or possibly even the World Bank since better planning and design is critical to helping reverse the destruction of the planet.

So bottom line?  I admit I’m not one with too much patience for “University think” and there was plenty at the first GeoDesign Summit.  But at the same time there was so much practicality shown that it isn’t hard to want to get Design and GIS more interconnected.  One group that I think was underrepresented at the Summit was Technologists (I can’t say Architects or Designers because in this crowd that means something else).  The gap between “GeoDesigners” and the public needs to be bridged with our work and our expertise.  Making sure that this is represented in this GeoDesign initiative is important and we are those who need to make sure this is grounded in reality and not locked up in University research.

So lets see what happens.  Will there be continued push back to “GeoDesign” from the geospatial community or will people want to be involved on the ground floor defining and encouraging GeoDesign?  I think we all realize powerful things happen when there is a marriage of design and GIS.

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