GeoDesign at TED2010

He compared beautiful Japanese temples, homes, and gardens-created by master designers who take nature into account-to sprawling, suburban housing tracts built with little thought to the surrounding environment.

"Japan is famous for the master designers who harmonised the use of land and structures with the environment around them, finding the right balance between building and nature," Dangermond said. "Contrast this with the sprawling, monotonous suburbia so familiar today. It's a kind of crime against nature."

A landscape architect by training, Dangermond founded ESRI in 1969 with a vision that computer mapping and analysis could help people design a better future. Under Dangermond's leadership, that vision has continued to guide ESRI in creating cutting-edge geographic information system (GIS) and GeoDesign technologies used in many industries to make a difference worldwide.

A student of the influential landscape architect Ian McHarg, Dangermond praised McHarg's pioneering concepts in ecological planning and explained how those ideas mirrored those put into practice by the Japanese master designers.

Dangermond said he believes that designing with nature, or GeoDesign, with all the best geospatial technology behind it, is the next evolutionary step in the design field.

"GeoDesign is both an old idea and a new idea. It reopens our minds and hearts; it puts in our hands the means to achieve what the Japanese masters did so many years ago-designing with geographic knowledge, thus living harmoniously with nature."