How should planners leverage Planning 2.0 to connect with their communities? This is the current topic of discussion at the ESRI Spatial Roundtable, where Placeways’ Doug Walker is a featured contributor. Visit the Spatial Roundtable to read the conversation and chime in with your own thoughts!

GeoDesign is a wonderful new term ESRI has coined for a lot of what CommunityViz software does.   At the recent GeoDesign Summit in California, about 300 invited guests and luminaries from the fields of planning, landscape architecture, design, and (of course) GIS spent two and a half days extolling its virtues, imaging its future, and trying to come up with a definition for what exactly “GeoDesign” actually means.

The short description of geodesign is the pairing of GIS and design.  The slightly longer one is something along the lines of the process of sketching possible plans, getting fast feedback on their impacts, modifying, and making decisions.

At the GeoDesign Summit, Bran Ferren, Chief Creative Officer of Applied Minds and former head of Disney Imagineering, scolded the group for not having a better definition and then went on to say that education is the world’s greatest woe and one that geodesign tools might redress.  Carl Steinitz of Harvard described five methods of planning and how geodesign helps every one of them.  And Tom Fisher, Dean of Design at the University of Minnesota, declared that geodesign is an essential tool for the fragile world we live in.  The excitement in the rooms was palpable, and those of us who attended had a strong sense that we might be in on the beginning of Something Big.

Well, not exactly the beginning — geodesign already has momentum, success stories, and enabling technology in the form of CommunityViz and tools like it.   The thousands of people who use CommunityViz often start by sketching their ideas for possible futures, using capabilities like Scenario Sketch Tools and Land Use Designer.  They get instant feedback on consequences via real-time analysis including visual presentations like dynamic charts and color-changing maps.  Analysis often crosses disciplines and the “smokestacks” or “stovepipes” of particular domains, as impacts of many kinds are modeled and displayed in side-by-side charts.  Users can go from 2D to 3D views quickly and easily, making proposals and their outcomes  easier to understand.  And in the end, people are making more informed, collaborative decisions.

CommunityViz isn’t the only geodesign tool around.  There are others that do bits and pieces as well, and the GeoDesign Summit was full of cool demonstrations and fascinating examples of what can be done when design and GIS come together.  What feels most new and exciting to us, along with the name, is the growing understanding of how powerful and important these capabilities really are.

It was not too many years ago that $100,000 or $200,000 would buy you a nice 3D visualization of a proposed transportation project: a bridge, an HOV lane, a transit stop, or the like. Compared to the cost of the project, a few hundred thousand dollars felt like a drop in the bucket, and the results seemed worth it. These were beautiful renderings designed to impress, and they did. “Cool” was the most common adjective; “wow” was the reaction to the technology. The models were unveiled with great fanfare in the boardroom during the budget approval meeting, displayed for the public, and, after that, posted on someone’s wall or in the lobby.

That was then. Today, transportation visualization is undergoing a rapid transformation. Costs are dropping, applications are exploding, and this formerly gee-whiz technology is making itself useful in all kinds of new ways. You could say it has left the boardroom, rolled up its sleeves, and gone to work.

A 3-D visualization brings to life a cross-section of a local commercial street.

CommunityViz is in the thick of it. With inexpensive but high quality 3D tools like Scenario 3D and the Google Earth Exporter, planners now have the ability to make effective visual models quickly and easily. They can sketch several alternatives early in the planning process, for example, to get some initial feedback and buy-in for a particular approach. They can create visual models of large regions instead of needing to focus on a small site. And, because it’s CommunityViz, they can consider the visuals together with the analytics—impacts, economics, etc.

If you’re looking for examples, try our case studies on TOD visualization and land-use-transportation integration.

To find out more about the latest from the Transportation Research Board’s Visualization Committee (of which Placeways’ own Doug Walker is a member), visit the committee’s new social network site at http://trbvis.ning.com.

This Scenario 3D screenshot is from a project in rural Killingly, Connecticut that Placeways has been helping with. It’s part of the broader, cross-discipline Borderlands Project and the associated Village Innovation Pilot that are working to preserve the unique assets of lands and towns along the Connecticut-Rhode Island border.

The particular location of this scene is called “Four Corners,” which—and this is the acid test—you would recognize if you’ve been there. I can make that claim because I asked, and people who live there knew it when they saw me “drive” down the street in the Scenario 3D Viewer. (Screenshots never seem to do the interactive 3D scene justice, but you get the idea.)

If you look closely you can see the scene starts with a pretty good (though not at all perfect) aerial photo draped on the ground (whose terrain came from contour lines). To that we added cars, utility poles, grass, trees, and extruded building footprints (those brown ones in the back). The cars point the right way because we used CommunityViz Scenario 360 to calculate the proper angle relative to the road centerline. We finished off with a few custom-made SketchUp models of the iconic sights: here you can see the tall Dunkin’ Donuts sign and historic Zip’s Diner in the background.

We certainly could have made a much more detailed and perfect-looking scene. For example that SUV in the intersection seems to be about six inches too high, and we could have replaced the brown extrusions with SketchUp buildings. If you get going on scenes like this, the list never ends: Shrubbery. Sidewalks. Pedestrians. Street signs. Etc., etc., etc.

In most cases, though, I think the trick is to do just enough. Granted, it’s fun to make 3D scenes. And sometimes the project calls for lots of fidelity and detail. But if you spend forever on every 3D scene, you’ll use up time and budget that probably could have been spent elsewhere.

The “just enough” test for existing conditions is that simple question I asked earlier: Would you recognize it if you’ve been there? If the audience can mentally place themselves in the scene with ease, making the connection between computer model and real world, then you pass the “just enough” test. You have sufficient context that when you start illustrating alternative scenarios and new proposals, people can picture them in place.

How much is “just enough” for illustrating the new proposals? I think the same rule applies. If, after looking at the computer model, you go visit the actual new construction for the first time and you recognize it easily, then the computer model was “enough.” If you design your work carefully, you might be surprised at how little modeling is required.

Damariscotta, Maine is a small New England town nestled along the coast and steeped in history and traditions. Old brick buildings line the main street; an ancient Native American oyster shell midden speaks to a long past of fishing; and in the fall, creatively decorated pumpkins line the streets as part of the annual Great Pumpkin Fest and Regatta.

But Damariscotta is looking to the future, as well, and as part of their planning they are using thoroughly modern tools including CommunityViz.

Recipients of a Heart and Soul Community Planning grant from the Orton Family Foundation, Damariscotta has embarked on a long-term planning process aimed at creating a vision, plans and actions to reinforce the qualities that make Damariscotta a great place to live. You can read more about it on Orton’s site and the project’s site.

A major focus of the project is what Orton calls “Heart and Soul,” or “those tangible and intangible elements that if lost would fundamentally change the character of [a] place.” In Damariscotta, an extensive outreach campaign drew out five broad values that residents share the most:

• living locally
• working locally
• sense of community
• where nature and culture meet
• access to town

If, for example, people here had to commute long distances to work, it just wouldn’t be Damariscotta, they essentially said.

The local consulting firm Spatial Alternatives, with some help from us here at Placeways, worked with the town to build a CommunityViz model that effectively scored plan alternatives on how well they would support each of the five values. Plans that had too little affordable housing, for example, scored poorly on “living locally,” while a dearth of jobs hurt the “working locally” score. The model was more complicated than this simplified description, but that’s the general idea.

Damariscotta Scenario Comparison

One of the best things about the model is that it isn’t a black box. Anyone can see how it’s built, and it’s easy to change. Better yet, the more subjective components are set up with CommunityViz slider bars so they’re easy to adjust during the course of a discussion.

There was a chance to try out the model “on the ground,” so to speak, during a design charrette that was held last month. While town residents met with planners by day and designers sketched ideas by night, CommunityViz was used to illustrate the effects different plans would have on the town’s character in years to come. How did it work? We’re not sure yet. Ask us in years to come!

Placeways staff will be at the ESRI Denver Open House on September 10 to show off the latest version of CommunityViz. The event takes place from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM in Broomfield, Colorado. If you’ll be in the area, please stop by — we’d love to see you!

Placeways’ own Doug Walker will be leading a planning workshop in Honolulu at the 2009 HCPO/HIGICC conference on September 23, 2009. This annual conference brings together planners and GIS professionals.  This year the focus is on environmental, economic, and social components of community resiliency, with particular focus on island issues such as climate change, sea level rise and coastal hazards.

If you’re in Hawaii, please join us!  If you’re not in Hawaii, here’s your chance for a business trip…?

The website you are on is new!

We have a fresh new look, lots of multimedia, and clearer organization, all designed to make it easier for you to find what you need.

One of the wonderful things about technology is that it keeps getting better.  Internet connections are generally faster these days, which means we can offer more high-bandwidth media like videos and slideshows and expect that most people will be able to view them.  Computer monitors are better, too, so we can present a wider screen and use millions of colors.  And handy software utilities like Flash players and Javascript platforms are more ubiquitous, so we can offer nicer visual effects and more sophisticated security and account management.

You might particularly notice the abundance of new content in the CommunityViz sections of this site.  When it comes to CommunityViz there has always been a lot to talk about, and now we have better ways to share it.  We’ve added dozens of new multimedia pieces including new videos and case studies, informational slide shows, and more sample outputs.  We’ve also reorganized a lot of the product information so that it’s easier to find.

What’s going on with our e-mail addresses, you ask?  We’ve started listing contact e-mails in a slightly strange format, like info \at\ placeways \d0t\ com, on purpose.  That’s in response to one of the not-so-wonderful advancements in technology:  spamming systems.  The idea is that humans can figure out what those e-mail addresses mean quite easily, but computers can’t.  Sorry for the inconvenience, but we hope it’s good for all of us in the end.

How do you like it?  We are welcoming suggestions, bug reports, and, of course, compliments — just send your feedback to that strange e-mail address in the previous paragraph.

This is one of my favorite photos of the past couple of months.  It might take a few moments to digest, but as you look you’ll see it captures an iconic CommunityViz moment.

Take it as a mini mystery.  What’s going on here?

That’s CommunityViz on the monitor in the center, of course, and a woman pointing at it with a pen, clearly emphasizing a point.   There’s a sign that says above the monitor that says, “Table 2,” and as you look around you realize the monitor is in the center of a table full of people, all studying intently.  There are water bottles and papers full of notes:  it’s a roll-up-your sleeves work session.  Everyone has a nametag:  these are people who didn’t know each other before, but they’ve clearly come together for this occasion.  And then, in the background, you realize there is a giant room full of tables just like this one:  at least 4, maybe another dozen groups like this, all working around their CommunityViz analysis, talking together, using data, building understanding.  This is the famous “informed, collaborative decision-making” of the traditional CommunityViz tagline.  This is people making decisions about the future of their community, better than they could before.

And now the real story behind the mystery.  This photo comes to us from Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) and their MetroFuture project.  MetroFuture is a remarkably large-scale project that is creating a vision for 164 cities in towns in the Boston region; over 4-1/2 million people.  The people in this photo are just some of more than 500 who participated in a CommunityViz-supported public process.  Read more about it at www.metrofuture.org.

“What’s the learning curve?”

That is one of the hardest-to-answer questions we get from prospective and new CommunityViz users.

It’s on my mind because we’re preparing for our next public training session in a couple of weeks.  “Public” trainings are for anyone, and the format we use, at least, pretty well covers the CommunityViz waterfront in 3 intense days.  On the other hand, we have literally watched as some completely new users worked their way through the tutorials (which come with the package) in about 3 hours, all on their own.  We’ve started offering interactive web-training in increments as short as 4 hours, and our on-line demos only take about 5 minutes each!  So from all this we can definitively state that the learning curve is… how long?

Experience shows (no surprise) that you don’t really learn CommunityViz until you use it yourself, on a project, at least once or twice.  Software tools (and maybe golf, and driving a car) are like that:  practice makes perfect.  But not really “perfect,” because a.) there is so much to know, and b.) the target keeps moving, because the software keeps evolving.   I know a person with a Ph.D. and 20 years of experience in ESRI GIS who says that about Year 15 he finally gave up on ever “knowing it all.”  CommunityViz isn’t nearly as encyclopedic as ArcGIS, but the same idea holds:  there is probably more there than most of us mere mortals will ever know.

But that doesn’t stop anyone (or at least it shouldn’t).  As we’ve built out CommunityViz functionality, we’ve done more and more to present features in layers of successive sophistication and complexity.  You can do a basic land use plan now with a handful of clicks, and then you can go deeper and deeper from there until you’re writing complex models and calling custom Python scripts from inside CommunityViz formulas.   At some point, not too far into your acclimatization, you probably reach a point where finding features and mastering their individual use comes quite naturally.  The interface is reasonably well designed; it’s not that hard to find your way around.

The deeper art of CommunityViz is not finding features and figuring out wizards.  It’s connecting all that capability to real-world projects.  It’s thinking about what decision-makers need to consider or need to know, and then using CommunityViz to show it to them.  It’s finding the perfect balance of rigor and speed to reach that magic state that we call “enough, good information.”  All that is beyond anything we can teach in a 3-day class (though we give is a start!), and so far there is no known learning curve for art.