Clinton and Geodesign

in some recent comments, President Bill Clinton wasn't talking directly about geodesign, but Esri's Jack Dangermond took them as being directly applicable to the topic:

"He talked about all the policies and discussion about climate change and population, and he said, 'I'm not really sure all these discussions are going to matter.' There was silence in the room. He said, 'What I actually have faith in are real projects. I'm dedicating my life to doing projects.' He said where the rubber hits the road is doing real project work. Isn't that really what geodesign is about?"

If you look at the work that academics in landscape architecture pursue, they often use projects as a foil for investigating or demonstrating the implications of the human dimensions of our uses and costs in the landscape.  The profession's academics had learned this lesson long before the former president.  But where will it lead?

Years from now, Dangermond said, people will look back at geodesign as "an evolutionary step for humans. It's going to be, 'Ah, finally we connected the dots. Finally we began to realize the implications or the consequences of our actions.'"

 With the possibility of integrating instantaneous feedback tools into geodesign software, we may soon become increasingly aware of explicit environmental or social costs  of design elements and schemes in a way that stops sounding like a gimmick and starts to change the underlying design processes.  Interesting stuff indeed.