Over the past several years, I have worked as a product designer and product owner for Re:Earth, collaborating with governments, educators, planners, and local communities across Japan.

At first, I believed my job was to build better GIS products—making it easier to publish maps, manage spatial data, and create web applications without requiring technical expertise.

However, as I worked on more public-sector projects, I began to notice a different pattern.

People were rarely asking for GIS itself.

Instead, they were asking questions about the places where they live.

Why is my neighborhood getting hotter every summer?
What kind of land is my house built on?
What should I do if flooding reaches my community?
How can residents better understand and participate in shaping their city?

These questions gradually changed my perspective as a product designer.

Rather than treating GIS as a collection of layers, maps, and analysis tools, I started thinking about how spatial technology could help ordinary people better understand their own environment.

In this talk, I will share several real projects that shaped this way of thinking, including:

helping residents explore the soil beneath their homes;
flood preparedness workshops that support discussion and decision-making rather than simply displaying hazard maps;
urban heat and sunlight analysis using 3D city models;
participatory city-planning workshops where students imagine the future of their neighborhoods.

These projects are not presented simply as case studies of Re:Earth. Instead, they illustrate a broader design challenge facing the geospatial community.

I will argue that the next step for open geospatial technology is not only making spatial data accessible, but making spatial understanding accessible.

As product designers, developers, researchers, and members of the FOSS4G community, we have spent decades building better tools for creating and publishing maps.

Perhaps our next challenge is different:

How can we help anyone—not only GIS professionals—understand, care about, and participate in the places where they live?