Shallowing the Learning Curve: Making GIS Easy Enough for Even an Architect to Understand

Author: Nils Gore
Organization: Mississippi State University

PO Box AQ
Mississippi State, MS 39773
USA

Phone: 662-325-2547
Fax: 662-325-8872
nils@sarc.msstate.edu

The Small Town Center is a research unit in the School of Architecture at Mississippi State University. We assist small communities with a variety of design and planning problems. In our work we also attempt to educate architecture students in a real-world setting and in a fairly short time frame (within an academic semester). In our research, we have found that even though architecture is an inherently geospatial profession, not many architects use GIS in an imaginative, design-oriented way. In an effort to use GIS creatively and to educate future architects about the potential of using GIS, we have redesigned the Arc interface to make it immediately useful to ourselves and to architecture students engaged in imagining the futures of our communities.