Landscape Ecological Planning and Geodesign

Our next speaker is Brian Orland, a faculty member at the Department of Landscape Architecture at Penn State, and he's going to be talking about engaged geodesign for the forgotten quarter of Pennsylvania. Brian.

Brian Orland: Great, thank you very much. This talk is a speculation on the body language of geodesign. It's driven by the work we do that involves a lot of community workshops where we do performances, where we present scenarios to communities. We run them through exercises using simply felt boards, drawings, whiteboards, blackboards, etc. And the question is, how do we translate that into the front end of a geodesign environment?

We are dealing in an environment where we have some unhappy people and some happy people. We are intending to bring help to the unhappy people in this environment. We're working in northern Pennsylvania, which is the heart of the Marcellus gas natural gas development. It's an area where two technologies have come together in the last ten years to dramatically reshape this landscape. You've probably all heard about fracking, hydraulic fracturing of gas. The other part of that technology is horizontal drilling, which now enables gas companies to drill for very wide extents under the landscape. Two things come out of that. One is that there's a lot more access to money. It makes the gas much more accessible than it previously was by vertical drilling. And as a result of that though, there is a distinct pattern that lies on the landscape that's caused by this regular placement of gas drill drilling rigs and drilling wells across the landscape, connected by pipelines and roadways. And pipelines and roadways have been the focus of what we've been looking at.

Sometimes our public meetings are not entirely friendly. But they do raise a good question. What are we doing for Jenny Skinner? What are we doing to help her and her landscape problems? And Jenny deserves the benefits that natural gas development brings her in the way of job opportunities, in the way of funds that she can use to afford education and healthcare for her family. But she also deserves an environment that's free from pollution, flooding, excess traffic, and forest fragmentation.

GeoDesign solutions are very cool and technically elegant and we certainly see a lot of those at this meeting. But in general, they are inaccessible to Jenny. She's in the wrong place. She's in a relatively remote, relatively underpopulated part of Pennsylvania. Regular people think through problems from a "what does this mean to me?" perspective, rather than a structured geographical one. So we've been experimenting with approaches that are really built on kindergarten models. Tell a story, play a game that explores some of the dimensions of that story, go to a treasure chest or a toy box to look for ways to explore that game further, construct a toolkit, and then start to solve real problems with it.

Oh, sound. I have no sound

Video: We won't know exactly until we do some surveying.

Is it impossible to go back to the beginning of this? Sorry. Okay, I got it.

Video:

Woman: How much of my land do you want to lease?

Man: We won't know exactly until we do some surveying.

Woman: And if I do lease it to you, what happens next? What happens when you're done?

Man: Excuse me?

Woman: What happens when you're done? What's my land going to look like?

Man: Well the whole place returns to normal.

Woman: Really? Just like you were never here?

Man: Ma'am, the fact is, we just won't leave until we get it right and you're satisfied. And I believe in this company. I have no interest in working for a company that wants to take advantage of people.

Brian Orland: So you can hear the Geo Design Concepts embedded into that little storyline. So now we take it a step further. We take our same characters into a game environment. And we've been using serious games in other kinds of settings, where they proved to be very effective in bringing about changes in energy using behavior. So the thought is, how can we adapt that kind of thinking to this setting? So this is a game structure, in a game like geo designers, it's a system. It's a system of connections that you navigate within. We give people the option to play at either being the farmer (Jenny, in this case) or being the land man, the person that sent by the gas company to lease the property. And these are some typical scenes from the game. I don't have an animation of the game to show you. But by picking routes through the landscape, by picking different directions that pipeline goes, from the well pad to the main pipeline, you encounter GeoDesign issues. You encounter the shortest route. Well, the first thing we run into is that it gets close to the wetland. We go through the forest. Well, it avoids the wetland and wetlands are protected by federal law, but it goes through a forest. And the farmer may indeed be concerned about the habitat destruction, about their opportunity to listen to songbirds and to hunt during the during the fall. We can go around the forest, but then the gas company's has to play the game of deciding whether he wants to pay the extra money for going around the the the forest and encountering two stream crossings, or whether it will go even further over to the left and avoid the second stream crossing, but encounter even more increase in cost of pipeline. And out of this game, we get a score. You played the game and you score. And again these are the kind of parameters that come out of a typical GeoDesign analysis but boiled down to their essence, so that the community people who, in a particular setting, are the people who end up being the geo designers. They are the people who are most charged with making choices about the way they use their own land. Putting it into parameters that are useful and immediately good to them.

How do we get that from a game to a real scenario? Well, we go to a treasure chest in this case. And what you'll see here is examples pulled from three years worth of student projects, working on this kind of topic. We can look through examples of analyses that have been run in the context of habitat fragmentation, land conversion, invasive plant species, explore those in order to discover which particular kind of analysis do I want to do. We have developed toolkits and these kinds of toolkits are familiar to all of you. But toolkits that decide on what will be the shortest route for a pipeline, depending on the number of constraints we put in its way. In this case, just an example showing what happens if we put wetlands in the way of those pipelines. But the one thing that strikes you is that there's a similarity between the system approach, or the system look of the model builder diagram, and the system look of the serious game that you design in order to explore this potential. These are the kind of outputs that we get from this, three different scenarios. And look at three different scoreboards associated with them.

So the question that I leave you with is this one. Can we improve the front-end to geodesign by using a simplified version, in the context of storyboards - the stories that we develop for people, and serious games that introduce them to understanding the parameters so that they can then come to us as geodesigners with an idea about how to frame their questions?

Thank you.