Enhancing Community Resilience with Participatory Visualization of Coupled Human and Hydrological Systems

We present the findings of a 3-year project on the use of visualization tools in collaborative water planning efforts in Northeast Illinois. We set out to understand how such tools allow people planning for future water... [ view full abstract ]

We present the findings of a 3-year project on the use of visualization tools in collaborative water planning efforts in Northeast Illinois. We set out to understand how such tools allow people planning for future water sustainability to jointly see the hidden effects of land- and water-use decisions on water supply, and how such visualization contributes to collective deliberation and policy innovation. We first built a developmental participatory agent-based approach, where stakeholders worked in small groups around a progression of coupled land-use and hydrological models—from highly abstracted to geographically detailed—to recognize and assess the impacts of proposed policies. Stakeholders learned how to use the models, understand the relationships among their components, interpret the meaning of their outputs, and modify the models with new insights from the discussions and their experience. Stakeholders jointly witnessed how water shortages could not be prevented by their preferred strategies if residential expansion continued. Despite the improved understanding, participants resisted policy innovation beyond the strategies they already knew. Adding details to simplified models did little to reduce participants’ cognitive dissonance and increase collective trust in the evidence they had generated. Instead, they challenged the validity of the models and of the research team. The instructional setting was not conducive to such agency, but rather pitted some stakeholders against the researchers.

We re-designed the participatory process so that researchers facilitated—rather than instructed—participants’ collaborative use of available online data and mapping resources, rather than the complex models used in our first trials. We also designed interfaces to support simultaneous collaborative use of hydrological simulations with mobile devices or paper-based tangible user interfaces. Novice users were exposed to a flooding model developed by our team to help them understand causes and impacts of urban flooding, and to allocate green infrastructure to address this problem. Participants preferred the hands-on tactile manipulation of land cover, especially if they did not know each other well, serving as a boundary object for discussion and action. The tangible interface allowed participants to use gestures to discuss dynamic, emergent outcomes, like the way runoff patterns changed, and generate solutions incorporating knowledge of these dynamics. Moreover, some users designed solutions that were as effective as those proposed by experts. More recently, we have developed a mobile tablet application to support compromise seeking. Participants used the tablet to individually prioritize the results by what they considered more important (e.g., damage costs, extent of flooding, downstream flooding), and used them to collectively generate different green infrastructure designs that made progress towards the participants’ diverse goals. These findings highlight the power of such tools to enhance collaborative understanding of complex environmental problems and innovation of solutions, and emphasize the need to support group goal deliberation, empathy and negotiation, beyond enhanced cognition.