We have been supporting GIS in schools for more than 25 years.
— Jack Dangermond
I have high hopes that GIS will become increasingly relevant for landscape architects as we make the tools easier to use for the design process of just inventory and mapping.
We started with things like locating ski runs or locating a transmission line corridor or locating a new town or doing a coastal zone plan. We ourselves weren't doing the planning work, but we were doing all the mapping work for the landscape architects and planners who would subsequently incorporate the maps into their actual designs.
My parents had no money, but they had strong values that I've carried throughout my life - things like not going into debt, never borrowing money, never leveraging, paying your bills on time, keeping your agreements, selling customers the right things, treating employees right, and growing things.
We aren't into the consumer space because that space is largely dominated by search and advertising, and it has a consumer face to it.
We have to build a better education in this country. We need to step it up.
Landscape architecture is basically geodesign; it's designing geography. And yet geodesign is not only done by landscape architects, it's done by some of the world's largest corporations.
In a nursery, if you don't take care of those plants, your profits get lost real quickly. You have to weed. You have to water. You have to nurture. Also, you have to take care of your employees in such a way that they do the same.
My parents owned a plants nursery. We all grew up growing things and planting things and selling things, and I also managed landscape crews.
There is the GIS world that is largely managing authoritative data sources, supporting geocentric workflows like fixing roads, making cities more livable through better planning, environmental management, forest management, drilling in the right location for oil, managing assets and utilities.
Bringing GIS into schools gets the kids very excited and indirectly teaches them different components of STEM education. That's been illustrated at school after school.
We shifted our philosophy from being a computer mapping group that would support planners to the idea of building actual software that would be well engineered. Because at that time, our software was not well-engineered at all; it was basically built with project funding and for project work, largely by ourselves.
On the landscape crew, I learned a lot from the other workers. We treated everybody equally, and we worked hard.
It takes a while for executives to understand that every company is a spatial company, fundamentally: where are our assets, where are our customers, where are our sales. But when they get it, they light up and say, 'I want to get the geographic advantage.'
Executives are waking up to realize that they can do a lot better, save money, make better decisions if they optimize and start thinking geographically and have a location strategy.
