This is part 7 of a larger blog post, you can read the introduction here.
It’s still a difficult concept for me, I have to admit, when it’s explained to me it seems to stupidly obvious that it hardly needs pointing out or given a name. Yet it’s useful to give what is coming a name, I say what is coming because I believe true ‘geodesign’ has not been done yet.
I regard ‘geodesign’ as the term we will use to explain how we will manage, create and plan things in the future by taking into account as much of the knowledge we have at our disposal from sensors, theories and analytical tools. When I say “as much of the knowledge we have“, I don’t mean how we do it now. For instance when planning a new city I don’t actually design by taking into account the sum of all human knowledge about that area and all the data current, historical and projected that relate to it. Nor do I take into account all the theories new, old and emerging that might be of relevance to urban form or planning or environment. Shocking isn’t it? Well, of course not really, no one can do that and if they say they can I’m pretty sure they’re lying.
We are starting to see the emergence of true Geodesign, all the technological pieces are lining up, ubiquitous sensors, internet, communications infrastructure, social networks, computing power. Now all we need is someone ( a Geodesigner?) to piece it all together into a unified global framework or system. So perhaps the last piece in the puzzle is probably that transactional database of the world that Jack has talked of.
Like driverless cars, the technology has been there for a while it just needs someone to fit it all together into a complete package.