A couple of years ago I was challenged to think about methods for understanding the long-term implications of climate-health interactions. I was asked by a colleague to sort out some methods that would help public health planners understand the complexity of climate-health relationships and transform them into priorities for action. Data from current health outcomes (e.g. malaria, dengue, malnutrition, heatstroke) can be rare, especially among health ministries that aren’t functioning as knowledge networks.  It is also common that methods supporting forecasting are viewed as impractical, confusing, and too complicated given that institutional systems are struggling to provide basic services – much less anticipation.  

Because data about the status and direction of health outcomes can be notably absent, we focused our attention on scenarios and the different methodologies. Scenarios are valuable for health and technology, in part, because they contain a certain narrative closure.  Clear winners and losers can emerge along with outcomes that measure conflict and contributions to the process.  On the flipside, that narrative certainty is a little too clean.  Real world interactions are messy.  However, the most importune implication is that scenarios make good design tools because they suggest future arrangements and demonstrate alternatives without interfering in current practice. Scenarios shift the context to an indefinite time in the future, an aliased set of actors, or a new place to make new propositions less personal.  This unbinds specific feelings of identity from new organizational arrangements and may leave participants free to experiment further.

Scenarios can be complicated to produce. They require focused study and time, and that seems too often in short supply.  Plus, you need hooks to get people engaged in finding and discovering the elements that ought to belong.  Scenarios should be plausible and internally consistent, but they also should be relevant to a broad range of stakeholders.  Some methods focus too narrowly on their own visions of the world, and can end up decidedly deterministic or expertly biased, as this critique of Royal Dutch Shell’s approach explains (opens pdf).  

Because the organization we were working with is committed to a open stakeholder process, we wanted a methodology that would accept diverse contributions and still be tied to one of the hallmarks of science: replicability.  So we kept some design criteria in mind while we explored:

Scalable

We wanted techniques that could allow us to look scenarios for specific contexts and regions, from hospital units to watersheds and beyond.

 

Participatory

Being able to use many perspectives was a definitive goal.  Not only are there differing accounts of actors and outcomes, participation does a much better job of revealing where goals might be in conflict in the system.  Participation is also critical for helping the results of the scenario process diffuse among different stockholder groups.

 

Translatable across domains

Public health and complex systems are increasing supported by people and things from a variety of disciplines.  We wanted insights from ethnographers to be as critical to the development of scenarios as live data streams of mechanical stress, if that’s what the scenario needed.  We also wanted the materials and insights generated by the process to be amenable to visual display, since many of the stakeholders may use different languages.  Visual formats also exploit the ambiguities of statements to reveal tensions that exist among interpretations.

 

Robust to diverse interpretations

Some of that tension is created when you get people from different backgrounds discussing what they think matters for interventions in particular health outcomes.  Different levels of expertise can expose the assumptions that people share.  The different elements of scenarios and how they emerge to affect long-term change often form the basis for many of this assumption.  Highlighting this ambiguity is critical later for negotiating strategies for action.

 

Accepting of qualitative and quantitative insight

Working across disciplines is critical.  One result of this is that the standards for evidence and data are different.  We also recognize that quantitative measurement provides a detailed description of the identity or behavior of system elements.  In particular, we wanted to be able to translate qualitative insights into format usable for compute modeling, simulation, and visualization.   

 

Fun and pleasurable

Despite many people’s paradoxical notion that fun things are bad for you, we see fun as enhanced participation.  When you forget that what you are doing is work, that’s a good thing. 

 

Readily usable and modular

Methods should move seamlessly between health outcomes and altogether different domains.  The process for malaria can be the same as heatstroke.  Understanding alternative energy futures may use the same process as malnutrition.  This enables practice and iteration.

As it turned out, scenarios techniques for climate-health interactions are not new, but they don’t deal well with uncertainty because they are explicitly aimed at extending interactions based on what the presence of domain knowledge and capable expertise.  How could you hope to understand possible priorities and act all while not knowing?  This was where we hoped to make a contribution.

Using Clamps to Build a Knowledge Network

Bob Johansen’s book, Get There Early outlines tools for dealing with dilemmas.  Dilemmas confound rationality-based problem solving because of the way they are structured (multiple stakeholders, goals, conflicts, and outcomes, diverse framings and interpretations) and because there is not a clear path to one or a few positive solutions.  Johansen outlines how Structure, Rules, Resources, Thresholds, Feedback, Memory, and Identity can be used as levers to help organizations attenuate themselves to the multi-textured shapes that dilemmas pose.  

I think this list is pretty right-on for at least three reasons. First, the metaphor of levers directly brings to mind the work of Donella Meadows, an environmental scientist concerned with sustainability.  Her work on leverage points for intervening in systems (pdf) is a great introduction and ordering of policy-based strategies and their efficacy for changing behavior.  Like Johansen, she articulates the role of rules and feedback in systems. Meadows goes on to explore ten other significant systems levers, ultimately tracing effectiveness to how we frame the “problem”.

Second, structure, feedback, memory, and identity point to second order, emergent characteristics.  Second order characteristics arise form the interactions of actors (e.g. people doing interesting things, wild coyotes, institutions, viruses), resources (e.g. coffee, water, land, low-interest loans, blood sugar), and their activities.  Kevin Kelly explores why we are seeing more impossible events taking place. He connects it to an emergence of second order behaviors made possible through the development of new actors, new infrastructure, and new rules.  Carl Simon, a Professor of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, has studied the characteristics of complexity in biological and economic system and often differentiates complex behavior from simpler behavior by looking for heterogeneity, non-randomness, feedback, heterarchy, and emergence.  Eric Berlow’s still great TED talk demonstrates how taking the broad, messy, and networked of complexity can in fact allow us to isolate clear paths for action. 

The third reason I think Bob Johansen’s tuning levers are great is that they overlap with basic elements in game design.  This should come as no surprise for most people associated with IFTF.  

When I was working on the climate-health scenario methods, we faced a challenge of providing some sort of suitable structure for participants to embed meaningful insight into the scenarios.  Sometime over morning coffee in a Swiss cafe, we stumbled across Tracy Fullerton’s rubric for the formal elements of games.  These formal elements complement narrative elements and give rise to the more emergent properties of complex systems.  Goals, procedures, actors, rules, resources, boundaries, conflicts, and outcomes also have a great synergy; they are exactly the elements used by computer programmers to construct agent-based models of complex adaptive systems! 

Creating Relevance for Participation

So now we had a structural backbone for the kind of content we felt we needed to gather during a scenario development process.  We could ask participants to engage in brainstorming activities that accounted for the different elements of these climate-health systems, and we would provide them with support, examples, and heuristics for doing just that.  We also wanted to find a way to make the process fluid.  In the back of our minds we always wanted to bring elements of game mechanics into the project to help support decision fatigue.

I’m still not sure we’ve cracked it, mostly because we haven’t been able to implement the process yet.  However, we have looked at different forms of turn-based play with clear, articulated goals for the players, not unlike the LEARN, ACT, IMAGINE rubric that worked so well for Urgent Evoke missions.  

One of the challenges is that we are introducing concepts about systems dynamics at the same time as concepts about the elements of the systems.  This sets up a lot of material to get through in a short amount of time.  

We also want to introduce experiences of empathy for others into the play and practice of scenario building.  In order to generate robust scenarios, the goals of different actors represented need to be recognized and incorporated as valid contributions.  One of the common experiences of public health service delivery is that managers, practitioners, patients, and others all have different views of the system.  These occluded perspectives mean that they have a difficult time in finding ways to enhance the social and ecological resilience of infrastructure.  I think if we had our choice, we would use experiences of empathy to reinforce principles along the lines of those championed by Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom for designing long-enduring institutions.

Another significant outcome of clamps and elements for scenario development is that they clearly lend themselves to visual means of communication.  Boundaries, resources, timings, and rules are common opportunities for change. Precise and ambiguous definitions can take on increased relevance, especially when dealt with creatively. One of the functions of mapping and visualization is to demonstrate this inherent ambiguity, pointing to areas for finding common ground. When we try to represent them visually, we are forced to make choices about the precise meaning of those boundaries, and this can be a significant source of cognitive dissonance for participants.  But it’s exactly the form of dialogue that’s needed.  It sets the stage for tactical strategies when conflicts emerge.  Boundaries flow, and their meanings and borders can sometimes be adjusted to reach consensus or compromise.

Assembling Scenarios in Everyday Life

One of the questions designers (of scenarios, tools, artifacts, anything really) have to ask themselves is, “Where does this fit in everyday life?”  One of the most useful rubrics I’ve come across for design is Products and Practices: Selected Concepts from Science and Technology Studies and from Social Theories of Consumption and Practice. (sorry, paywall). The authors make a case for a social and infrastructure-based approach to design.  They identify acquisition (how we find it), scripting (how it shapes practice), appropriation (using it for something else), assembly (where we use it), normalization (sharing along with others), and finally practice (what activities it supports).  What is great about this list is that it helps designers imagine the contexts of use.  

In our scenario construction process we had to identify where this process existed along with a range of other activities that needed to be carried out by participants.  This assembly meant that our process had to connect to other activities in a meaningful way.

The current processes and guidelines for conducting Vulnerability and Adaptation assessments in vulnerable regions hinge on their level of stakeholder involvement.  Some processes are top-down, others bottom-up, and others a mix of expertise and engagement.  

One way to assemble scenarios into these processes is to:

1) Define the scope and focus which usually means identifying the health outcome of interest.

2) Work out a baseline for which information may not exist. This is where defining system elements can be helpful for laying out current distributions and burdens, strategies for coping, early prioritization of “drivers”, and the interactions between elements that affect their dynamics.

3) From this point on, forecasts can be made about future trends and conditions. For example, what happens if boundaries change? How about if an actor appears or disappears?

4) Once forecasts are made, the task is to frame and narrate the interactions as scenarios. This is a great opportunity to develop the scenario through the eyes of others. Games, agent-based models, visualizations, and mapping can demonstrate change over time and the differences in scales affected while uncovering an array of interesting and unexpected interactions.

5) Isolation and sequencing asks participants to step back from what they produced, to look at the areas of concern, and to select the most relevant links between scenario elements. By focusing attention on these links, the next task is to order the steps they will need to affect change by listing priorities for action.

6) Package and disseminate the scenarios and the priorities for broad communication and feedback.

7) Use the feedback and resulting statements to assess how the scenario process and how it enabled participants to identify and act on the priorities they generated.

As you can see, it’s a richly-textured process, highly-amenable for visual communication, and ripe for engagement. I think one of the most important functions is the ability to expand the number of elements that matter to long-term change.  One of the key decisions that participants have to make is to ask whether a resource, boundary, conflict, actor, rule, or procedure matters or makes a difference to the health outcome of interest.  Here Gregory Bateson’s statement about information as, “a difference that makes a difference” looms large.  More on that in the future.

Signals from Noise

One of the key endeavors of public health, infrastructure, and technology is the attempt to identify signals in noisy environments.  Signals are utilized in biology to communicate across chemical gradients, metabolic networks, neuronal synapses, visual spectra, haptic musculature, individual displays of affection, and as invitation for cooperation across groups and societies.  Technological systems stimulate behavior in new and exciting ways, but they can also script and normalize actions that may limit our abilities to find success. 

The biggest challenges in generating signals for any medium is to make them relevant enough to transcend noise and competition from similar signals elsewhere.  Synergistic timing with the individuals or groups receiving them is critical – as this will help them become meaningful in helping receivers revise their previous beliefs or come to new conclusions.

John Snow’s well-know map showing cholera cases in the London epidemic of 1854 clustering around the Broad Street well was an early success in distinguishing signals from noise using visualization and tight clamps that link actors (cholera, people, wells), boundaries (streets, houses), resources (water), and procedures (washing, drinking). These interactions clearly led to an understanding of a health outcome, and the relationships, once linked, could be used to forecast future scenarios.  

PETLAB and the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Center have been collaborating to help illuminate different, contradictory signals, that may become confusing to recipients during a weather-based crisis.  This game supports better decision-making to manage the damage of incorrect flooding predictions. 

Before the Storm is another game from the Parsons/Climate Centre collaboration that introduces forecasting to new audiences and uses the scenarios produced to help identify what the participants feel would be the most relevant and practical stapes to take during a flooding emergency.  

Climate Health Impact – a simulation based game designed to give biology students a better understanding of the health impacts of climate change.  It does do a great job of representing standard practices worldwide that contribute to the understanding and management of emerging vectors.  What I like here is the attention to new actors and their relationships with policy measures, research processes, and geography.  There’s a lot of detail about disease specifics as well, but narratively, it does reinforce a fairly top-down perspective. 

Agent-based models sometimes very effective for examining conflict among different actors.  This paper by [img_assist|nid=3955|title=Hailegiorgis et al. models a human-environment interaction|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=199|height=104]Hailegiorgis et al. models a human-environment interaction (pdf) and demonstrates how cyclical rainfall can reveal a pattern of punctuated conflict.  The pattern suggests that durable mechanisms for cooperation (e.g. clear boundaries, enforceable rules, mechanisms for redress, nested institutions) will be needed to traverse environmental change if the communities are going to maintain their resilience. 

The Future of Scenarios

What do scenarios look like when the are disseminated and opened up for engagement?  I think they look closer to everyday life.  To understand the impacts of alternative scenarios we have to look at out interpersonal relationships – at the things that are one or two degrees removed.  How will climate-health interaction affect our pets, our sex lives, how we eat dinner, getting to and from work, and our expectations when we encounter each other on the street?  I think the genre of climate-health scenarios and perhaps all scenarios is not one of horror, western drama, or even fantastical sci-fi; it has to be more subtle, more internally embedded in social values and individual goals.  It’s melodrama about how we live and how we live it everyday.  That’s the real scary, far-out stuff.  

The CDC’s done a really smart thing. They lied. They created an entirely “unscientific” risk to respond to a completely “scientific” human bias.  The CDC provided an emergency management and disaster preparedness plan in case of a Zombie Apocalypse. This says two things to me: 1) the CDC is serious enough in its priorities to ignore the boundary work that usually goes on in science organizations that tries to keep culture and science separate, and 2) they understand that human bias often impedes our ability to prepare for more “rational” risks.

So I would call this a media coup – especially if (as I suspect) there was a huge spike in visits to their site since the story crashed the server.  I’m sure it helped that some people are actually predicting a zombie apocalypse this weekend.

What I like about this is the acknowledgment that people are interested in fiction at least as much as they are in reality. As a scientist or policy maker in disaster management, it’s worth recognizing that people aren’t going to respond or think a certain way just because it makes the most rational sense.  Zombies may make more sense because they tap into deeper fears and hopes and long-held narratives that are embedded in our cultural fabric.

post-normal science

Using zombies to carry the more important message of preparedness – and the specific steps to take – is way more important than the reality of a zombie apocalypse. Then again, better safe than sorry!

Evolutionary biologists take note!

The good people at GOOD have had some great design contests.  They really believe in the efficacy of design for responses to difficult problems.  I love how they run ‘em too; they’re straightforward and they get the creative juices flowing.

The GOOD Vaccine Challenge aims to raise awareness about vaccines and the vital role they play in the fight for global health. And they’re offering $5000 to projects (er, publicly voted on) that can be done in 3 months.

Sign for Immunization Centers to Advertise the Availability of Vaccines

Vaccine delivery is severely limited by bias, cultural beliefs, and communication among health service providers and vaccine recipients. One action to be taken is to create durable signs as messages to help reinforce demand for vaccination services.

An analysis of refusal data shows that resistance to vaccine is highest in underserved (largely Muslim) communities and that social influencers are critical to acceptance. The name Taveez describes an amulet or talisman worn around the neck to ward off evil. It is a prevalent practice among Mulsim groups, and it influences beliefs about health and protection among some of the most polio-vulnerable populations.

CKS and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation created this Vaccine Delivery Report (pdf 5mb) to highlight some of those challenges. Using a service design approach, researchers identified a range of patterns and barriers to delivery. They identified some possible solutions that can serve as technological options that would fit in the socially-contested landscape that affects people’s understanding and acceptance of health interventions.

One of the “low-hanging fruits” is the simple and direct need to communicate the presence of vaccination service points. It is often assumed that people will know where and when some vaccination event is happening, but this may not be the case. It is also critical that vaccination services create expectations of trust that comes from durability and continuous presence (and accountability) in the community.

The proposal is a simple mock-up for a sign that would be placed at vaccination locations or elsewhere with location information. The goal is to help raise awareness among mothers in regions (particularly the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh) where polio still impacts the livelihoods of children and families. It draws on the need for a non-verbal approach that clearly indicates the risk, the solution, and the recipient population. According to the WHO, only four countries remain endemic: Afghanistan, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan. This proposal would be implemented in India.

While this seems a simple distribution task, it is complicated by complicated institutional infrastructures. Decisions typically go through the Indian Government (which tends to treat public health as a function of medical treatments and not in terms of broad population education). Other providers include Rotary International and UNICEF, which have their own processes and policies regarding health communications. These can be difficult organizational structures to promote change in (especially if you aren’t in a leadership position).

I asked a colleague with firsthand knowledge of how service design may get integrated into the system:

The diffusion is the biggest challenge here. First of all, the government health mission will not entertain individual designs for mass roll out. These posters are generally put up by funded health agencies and only when it is a part of a larger program in which they have a hand. For this also I think many such organizations like UNICEF already have their own internal graphics team.

Design can provide significant added value with a relatively low cost of implementation. Push strategies such as incentives are unlikely to be successful unless they consist of other health services of value. Thus, a demand-based approach may be more appropriate in getting recipients to pull for vaccinations themselves, but they must see the value demonstrated conclusively. The use of celebrities as influencers has been successful in the past. It’s a one approach among more general tactics that use social proof to reinforce demand and acquisition of the vaccinations by vulnerable individuals.

In discussing the plan with a colleague, she sees private players like mobile operators and fertilizer companies as partners in the process. India Post is anther possibility and especially extensive given their broad network. The project would then be to work with them to get graphics endorsed and uniformly rolled them out along with their own communications and throughout the landscape as a gesture of support. She went on, “This has a mutual benefit of building up their brand equity as well as drawing people’s attention using a product (telecom) which more Indians have access to than anything else.”

Using Social Proof to Build Credibility and Demand for Vaccination Services

GOOD is one of those publishing groups that’s sort of like a cross between WorldChanging and ISO50. They pull together interesting, relevant research and ideas from the web, but they bring it all together with a stunning array of infographics designed to present information meaningfully. It helps that they bring education, design, and health directly into the fold.  And the have a good twitter feed (whoops, no pun intended).

A couple weeks back I was spending some time on pyramids, and GOOD’s link to a double pyramid showing the relationship between diet and agricultural intensity (read: let’s get away from the amorphous “environmental impact”) got me interested in their Redesigning the Food Pyramid contest.

FoodNet

An early iteration of the food pyramid – turned – network paradigm.

Since I also happen to be doing some work on agricultural supply -and- what I would call attachment ecologies (these are links that create what we call health, wealth, concepts, diet, and technology), I started to wonder how the food pyramid might be implemented using the Indian version of a food pyramid and dietary requirements.

My first stop was to take a look at some of the nutritional guidelines designed by the U.S. (since this would be my main focus – for the contest at least).  The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Department of Agriculture issue new guidelines every 5 years.  I checked out guide for 2005 and the upcoming revisions for 2010 for inspiration.

At the same time I was attempting to find out what guidelines India uses.  This turned out to be trickier that I had anticipated.  The National Institute for Nutrition (NIN) issues the guidelines.  The last time they did this was in 1998.  NIN performed an array of information, education, and communication efforts.  However, despite these efforts, the 2005-06 National Family Health Survey found no significant improvement in the nutritional status of the Indian population in the seven years (1998-2005) since the guidelines were issued.

FoodBar

A second iteration - trying to make the network "list accessible".

As it happened, I lucked out with a news article describing how the NIN was looking for suggestions for revising the guidelines and their dissemination – specifically around how to create awareness of the guidelines.  This helped me uncover a few different documents and sources of information.  I tried calling of course, but that was unfortunately not productive as I kept getting passed to someone else.  The basic guidelines can be found at the India Development Portal, but they must be mail ordered from NIN here.  I was able to find specific daily nutritional requirements tables here, but the providence of the document is unclear (I’m guessing NIN).

In the meantime, I started formulating suggestions for how to improve the dissemination of the guidelines.  I sent these to NIN, and a follow-up call revealed that they had seen them, but hadn’t yet responded.  I’m actually optimistic that they might find them useful.

What initially interested me about the pyramid was the opportunity to represent the notion of a networked diet – one that ties into a variety of cultural and ecological options & constraints.  Etching through the design and layout process, I started arriving at some ‘solutions’.

weekly-food-choices

A decision support tool for making food choices.

The U.S.-based diet guide arrived first, and as I started wondering what to do with the leftover empty space (while trying to figure out how to make it less flat), I realized that food icons would do both.  Then as I started thinking about how the graphic “assembles” into everyday life, the concept of the food refrigerator magnets started to materialize.

fridgeMagnet

Using magnets to provide interactivity, daily, and weekly reminders of food goals and choices.

Turing out the Indian version is going to be a bit trickier.  For one thing, “My Weekly Food Choices” and “My Food Web” looses relevance in places where someone else makes decisions for you.  Plus, the collective aspects of eating means the choices are often negotiated within families or groups.  Thus, it will probably become something like “Our Food Web”.

In representing amounts, it’s interesting that Indian guidelines are purely in grams (except milk which is mL).  The U.S. system uses two types of volume (cups and ounces equivalent) and one weight (grams, for oils).  However, I think the next big challenge will be to get some food icons for Indian foods (north and south).  Any takers?

weekly-food-choices-INDIA

Dietary guidelines and decision aid for India

It’s not often that unfunded proposals make their way into disinfecting daylight. Sometimes you try again, and sometimes you just let them waste away among the dusty electrons of your hard drive.

I don’t know which category this one falls into, but I do feel it’s worth sharing and making public. Perhaps someone will even comment with improvements. I can only hope.

In any case, this proposal was dependent on a constellation of partnerships (and funding) to make the project move forward–at least from my perspective. Sometime a little cash can help develop needed projects and spur collaboration. This was a submission to the Knight News Challenge which is supposed to announce its winners sometime in mid-June. Since I know I’m already out of the running, there isn’t really a compelling reason not to share—but please tell me if there is!!!

envirocasting logo

Describe your project:
Envirocasting adapts global weather information to the cultural and operational needs of local [international disaster preparedness organization] branch offices and communities, supporting their risk assessment and preparedness needs. A wealth of information exists to support disaster preparedness, but a gap exists between the design of information services and their local use-contexts, limiting widespread use and effectiveness. The benefits of these information services are clear to local decision makers, and they are anxious to put the tools and news sources into practice.

However, exposure to digital news platforms is low, and the capacity to use them in decision making contexts is minimal as a result of this disconnect between design and use.

Envirocasting takes a design anthropology approach to inform the design, distribution, and acquisition of digital weather information services to local decision makers. Design anthropology seeks to understand the role of design artifacts and processes in defining what it means to be human. Using this approach, local patterns of information consumption and culture related to futures, information design, and technological metaphors can be identified, allowing for the design of appropriate services. Design principles as well as specific, local use-applications will aid in the distribution and assessment of weather forecast efficacy. Thus, weather news for risk assessment can flow more precipitously to decision makers, allowing them to coordinate the disaster preparedness efforts more quickly and strategically.

Simulation games for local communities will support learning and the application of information services in context. This provides use-case memories of the future and practice in managing uncertainty with minimal risk.

How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?

Envirocasting aims to localize climate information by making it simple, non-technical, clear, easy to use, and as meaningful as possible. Maps are relevant when their colors, numbers, icons, and scales are relevant and supported by culture and context. Information that connects with specific actions can be used confidently in planning and decision making. Specific use-cases communicated by local communities will drive the development process and will help weave the digital media fabric with aesthetics, narratives, and metaphors. Games support critical thinking and social play to help decision makers and communities explore the dynamics of news and information-based decisions for climate-related disaster preparedness.

How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists)

Envirocasting innovates by translating connections between design and use. When local conditions refract the design and dissemination of information from distant or multiple sources, innovation is an inherent byproduct. Envirocasting is designed with the mind in mind, understanding cultural legacies that influence the recognition of uncertainty and metaphors. It bridges experience, play, and interactions, creating memories of the future. The project identifies appropriate implementations of open-source digital information services and defines a set of prescriptive resources for innovating across disaster risk contexts and cultural processes based on abstractions and lessons from six local communities in three countries.

What unmet need does your proposal answer?

A fact-finding mission conducted surveys, interviews, meetings and workshops over two-month periods in 2008 and 2009.

Explicit unmet needs include:

1. An Increase in the Accessibility and User-Friendliness of Climate Information Products
2. New Products to Fill Information Gaps for Needs–Starting with Improved Flood Forecasting Tools
3. Training in the Use of Climate Tools and How Climate Information Could Trigger Action Such as:
   • Learning to access and interpret climate information tools.
   • Learning how to monitor seasonal forecasts in conjunction with medium and short-term forecasts.
   • Understanding how to take gradated actions.
   • Channels of communication and decision-making to receive and take action based on time-sensitive climate information.

And don’t take my word for it:

What will you have changed by the end of your project?

More-Measurable outcomes:

• Prototypes that adapt weather information services to local use-contexts.
• Documents that communicate design processes for cross-cultural communication.
• Heuristics or ‘rules-of-thumb’ for the design of climate information services for risk assessment.
• Country and local use-context reports that document specific patterns of information acquisition and behavior.
• Relevance of climate information for local decision-makers.
• Ability to align information with decision and action.
• A folktaxonomy of climate information and categories for creating a cultural consensus model (CCM) to realize translations in cognition and practice among cultural contexts.
• An index of context-specific actions and the values associated with them.

Less-measurable outcomes:

• Perception of the design process and innovation pathways for news and information about climate-driven risks.
• The relationship between information providers, researchers, designers, policy makers, and implementing offices providing the opportunity for continued support, training and dialogue necessary to realize the potential benefits of using climate information.
• Channels of communication between information providers and decision makers and between decision makers and community constituents (incl. digital information services).
• The scope of the implementing organizations to conduct cross-cultural research and information adaptation projects.

How will you measure progress and ultimately success?
The uses of weather and hazard preparedness information can be measured using surveys, interviews, meetings and workshops and compared to current estimates of use and use cases, but those data are useful differently for different people including the decision-makers, their constituents, their supporting agencies, and funders of this project. Thus, we intend to cast progress in varied terms for the different stakeholders and partners.

Some of these guiding questions include:

• What are the iterations, changes, and improvements to existing systems?
• What does the trajectory of individual decision-maker’s tasks or questioning look like?
• How do other elements of the media ecology change and what stakeholders are invoked or leveraged in the process?

Success, on the other hand, is more elusive. Disasters are sporadic and may not always afford a direct link between information effectiveness and risk reduction. However, existing case studies show that these types of information, when combined with specific actions, can lead to significant reductions in both the vulnerability and negative effects of a disaster such as flooding. The key to assessment it to engage in a continual processes where we value choices and transitions in practice. The design of this project take into account the high-stakes involved in the decision-making and information uses by providing opportunities for both high stakes (post-hazard) and low stakes (simulation-games) assessment.

Do you see any risk in the development of your project?

The biggest risk at present is that the organizations listed do not have a history of working together (this is indicated by the generic names rather than their proper ones), but this is also where the opportunity exists. The leadership (particularly of the larger orgs) is wary of their participation in the project without first-hand knowledge of all partners and/or certain funding. This conversation is ongoing at the time of this application and continues to develop. If the proposal moves through to the next round, we should at that point be able to name each of the partners in more specific terms.

Supply-side risks (design-mediated)

• Inability to generate meaning either through lack of empathy or translation of needs to designers
• Research products are not absorbed and implemented during the design processes because they are non-normative, unclear for direct application, left uncommunicated, or other
• Partner coalition denatures from lack of shared goals or mental models
• Emphasis on technological development or information diversification over use-context and user needs
• Existing insights, stakeholders, and methods are unknown or unengaged
• Irrelevance, inability, or non-linkage of digital mediums and meaningful information services
• Cultural heterogenetiy too great for scaling of appropriate information services
• Ability and capacity of project managers to recognize and adapt to other sources of risk
• Expertise of project partners is missing or unleveraged
• Translation of local use-contexts into primary research is distorted or biased

Demand-side risks (user-mediated)

• Low frequency acquisition of technology platforms, information services, and/or symbolic systems
• Scripting of use and application to local decision making is unclear
• Appropriation for local use-cases is nonexistent
• Assembly does not fit into the local context of everyday life
• Cannot be integrated into normal practices, culture, and concerns
• Practice with information and platform is sparse

What is your marketing plan? How will people learn about what you are doing?

The conduits for marketing are, in many respects, already in place. The organizational structure and extent of [intl. disaster preparedness agency] branch offices will facilitate branding and distribution using existing networks of community organization, tactical planning, and response offices. Though the value of the services should be self-evident in the design and cognitive acquisition of the services, the goal is to help users to practice using and applying these information services. We also recognize that aesthetic values can elevate the recognition of value and the maintenance of that value through everyday use. Thus, arriving at these values will be a principle objective for all participants.

In order to increase domain knowledge, the outcomes can be shared among the participants, their centers, and via professional and interest networks including the design research community which actively engages with similar project goals. Because some of the project partners include university centers, schools and research organizations, the outcomes will be shared with emerging professionals including graduate students and visiting fellows.

Tactically, the marketing plan for simulation game-based training is slightly more difficult because it requires additional preparation, training, and presentation. Nonetheless, with a bit of effort, these games will reinforce the marketing strategy for the primary goal of adapting weather information using the same local community branch office network structure. We also expect to develop videos that demonstrate our process as well as the use and value of the informations service under construction. But ultimately, the best marketing will be the effectiveness of the adaptation process.

Is this a one-time experiment or do you think it will continue after the grant? If it is to be self-sustainable, what’s the plan for making that happen?

Envirocasting is the application of a process to translate meaning across cultural contexts with relevance for local concerns. We do not view it as an experimental process so much and an underutilized one. Luckily, there are many resources, case studies, and additional expertise to draw from in the process. Our goal is to assemble them and to draw the pieces together into relevant platforms and prototypes for weather information services.

The project will accomplish this goal as a one-time research project that will publicly document its methods and outcomes as guides so that they can be applied in new use-contexts and for wider information arrays. We fully expect that the different project partners will continue to apply the work and experience in varied ways after the initial project, although they may carry it out to their own ends.

Our method for fostering rhizomatic-like dissemination of the results (and thus, sustainability) is to link with additional strategic partners whose networks span varied social groups, languages, use-contexts, and concerns. Furthermore, the acquisition and integration of the research (as well as the information services it supports) can be broadly advocated from a policy perspective because successes arise from its application and benefit in specific, local communities. The overall plan for sustainability is to demonstrate that these information service platforms reduce risk by enabling decisive action before pending hazards become disasters. If this is demonstrated, sustainability will ensue, even if not in the form described in this proposal.

Disasters are a combination of cognitive, social, infrastructure, and ecological failures. Preparation in each system helps to create buffers to provide resilience within each system that can in turn translate to resilience in each of the other systems. Thus, trends, impacts and the frequency of disasters are often amplified by the interactions between different social domains, resource bases, and locations.

riskTable

1. differentiate between high frequency trends and low frequency trends (partly because cognitive biases inhibit objective estimation),
2. the potential for changes in their relative frequencies and path dependency (low frequency becoming high and vice versa),
3. the cumulative impacts at different temporal and spatial scales of interaction, and
4. the emergence of threshold effects where small impacts can have big effects.

The rise in frequency of natural disasters is being compounded by population growth (especially in urban, coastal, and low-lying areas) and increased vulnerability because of interactions among resources and risks (see table 1 for examples). Many natural phenomena tend to be recurrent. For example, diseases re-emergence in and out or areas and population, sometimes in cycles, while often borne from social-ecological network differentiation (Janssen et al., 2006). These recurrences can affect the same regions and populations again and again–either out of geographic, genetic, or behavioral specificity. Impacted populations have narrow opportunities (if at all) to restore livelihoods and coping mechanisms between events. This can accelerate chronic vulnerability.

Key trends discussed and communicated in the literature relate sea levels, temperature, precipitation, resilience, and extreme events to climate change (Prasad et al, 2009). While these are specifically the result of abiotic processes, other, underemphasized, social trends emerge that are important for managing coping strategies–especially where cities are concerned. These trends include:

Cultural Preferences: This is perhaps the least understood of any emerging trend, and we don’t know much about how the various components of this trend are distributed at any given moment. Cultural preferences includes things like how new skills, uses, and behaviors are acquired, the ways they are arranged in everyday life to fill particular needs, how existing artifacts or concepts are appropriated, and what it takes for small, limited sets of practices to widen and become normalized in larger populations. As a trend, many human systems are moving towards knowledge networking which will accelerate normalization. Less frequent are the hybrid ways of creating new coping strategies that build on other unrelated themes or needs. As a result it is pretty easy for most disaster management and preparedness disciplines to dismiss it as a leading component of interest.

Uncertainty and Risk Diversification: As the intensity of experience and practices with technologies, the environment, and human population increases, uncertainty and the recognition of risk becomes more evident. This is to say that we tend to project more uncertainty and develop a larger number of risks as our knowledge of the environment widens. Thus, while there are real and significant increases in the number of risks, the increase and perceived impact is also a function of our own cultural sources of knowledge production and risk assessment. This in no way delegitimizes the risk of climate driven disaster. It only adds a unique dimension to our reception and relationship with them.

Urbanization: In 2008, the global population became equally distributed between rural settlements and cities. This trend will continue for a variety of reasons including individuals’ search for economic agency in cities. It highlights a broader pattern of preferential attachment–a social phenomenon in which people (agents) tend to want to join up with other agents that have multiple connections, either to other people, things, or places. It also signals a significant perceptual shift in our understanding of ecology and its anthropogenic impacts–away from systems where humans are seen externally to one in which the landscape is unequivocally ‘disturbed’ and redistributed (Ellis and Ramankutty, 2008).

Ecosystem Service Disruption: Healthy ecosystems are a keystone of resilience. They buffer vulnerable populations from the impacts of disasters by maintaining critical life support services such as soil for agriculture, water filtration and sequestration, nutrient cycling, organic waste recycling, gas exchange + air pollution mitigation, and the ambient commons (McCullough, in prep) which support the awareness of a continuum between culture and infrastructure.

ad hoc Solutioning: In India, the Hindi term Jugaad describes technologies that are patchworks of on-hand materials to fix and make due with what is convenient and ‘affordable’. They build (no pun intended) on an ease of use and innovative skill in the context of personal or collective economic agency. They can insert sustainability using biodegradable, local, and available materials–deemphasizing systems of manufacturing while emphasizing individualism and craft. However, jugaad may also substitute expectations for semantics, trading durability for extended (or distended) service relationships in the absence of independently verifiable standards. The impact of this behavioral tactic with artifacts is that technologies can have a low threshold for failure because they depend on service and labor for continued maintenance. When the services become otherwise compromised, the artifacts create further risks.

Occupation of High Disturbance and/or Diversity Landscapes: Along with trends in urbanization and ecosystem services, people tend to locate in regions where resources are abundant and that tend to support a large amount of diversity. One of the main ecological predictors of biological diversity is the ongoing process of disturbance, which continuously opens up new niches and creates genetic diversity across populations. This points to the presence of large urban settlements in areas prone to disturbance and potential disasters either from earthquakes, flooding, cyclone, tsunami, or wildfire, for example.

Now what do these trends mean for emerging health risks in the context of climate change?

References:
Ellis, E. C., & Ramankutty, N. (2008). Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 6(8), 439–447.

Janssen, M. A., Ö. Bodin, J. M. Anderies, T. Elmqvist, H. Ernstson, R. R. J. McAllister, P. Olsson, and P. Ryan. 2006. Toward a network perspective on the resilience of social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society 11(1): 15. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art15/

McCullough, M. in prep. Ambient Commons. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mmmc

Prasad, N., F. Ranghieri, F. Shah, Z. Trohanis, E. Kessler, and R. Sinha. 2009. Climate resilient cities : a primer on reducing vulnerabilities to disasters. Washington (DC) : World Bank Group Info Shop. ISBN 978-0-8213-7766-6

Where People Live

Anthropogenic Biomes: Definition
Anthropogenic biomes are similar to ecological biomes: they describe patterns of vegetation, climate, and ecosystem processes. However, they also take into account the anthropogenic influences of land use and population density on ecosystem processes. Ellis and Ramankutty characterize anthropogenic biomes as heterogeneous landscape mosaics, combining a variety of different land uses and land covers. Some of this heterogeneity is driven by natural landscape variation, as well as human enhancement of natural landscape (e.g. intensive agriculture) and human created landscape (e.g. construction of settlements and transportation systems).

The Regional Classification System they developed is as Follows (Ellis and Ramankutty, 2008):
Dense Settlements: Urban, Dense Settlements

Villages: Rice Villages, Irrigated Villages, Cropped and Pastoral Villages, Rainfed Villages, Rainfed Mosaic Villages

Croplands: Irrigated Cropland, Residential Rainfed Mosaic, Populated Irrigated Cropland, Populated Rainfed Cropland, Remote Cropland

Rangelands: Rangelands, Populated Rangeland, Remote Rangeland

Forested: Populated Forests, Remote Forests

Wildlands: Wild Forest, Sparse Forest, Barren

Of Earth’s 6.4 billion human inhabitants:
40% live in dense settlements biomes (82% urban population),
40% live in village biomes (38% urban),
15% live in cropland biomes (7% urban), and
5% live in rangeland biomes (5% urban)
0.6% live in forested biomes.

Asia and Oceania have the most diversity in the distribution of these regions around the world.

Global Anthropogenic Biomes

Further refinement is possible (Alessa and Chapin, 2008) by resolving distributions of social values, dietary patterns, movement patterns, resource use and between local and regional scales, inter alia.

Why Anthropogenic Biomes Matter for Public Health and Other Forms of Research
Anthropogenic biomes are a more accurate description of broad ecological patterns than are systems that exclusively describe vegetation patterns based on variations in climate and geology. Likewise, anthropogenic biomes may be better at representing patterns of human interactions with the environment and describing the driving factors in health outcomes. There are multiple reasons for this that stem from the varied roles that ecosystem, climate, cultural, and social relationships enact in dialogue with each other.

Anthropogenic biomes differ substantially in terms of basic ecosystem processes (eg carbon emissions, reactive nitrogen) and ecosystem biodiversity. These factors in turn affect the relative availability of resources for that region, including and especially ecosystem services like clean air and water and nutrient availability for agriculture.  Furthermore, they must necessarily feed back into human ways of knowing and interacting with the environment.

Anthropogenic biomes can be connected to global patterns of ecosystem processes, along with anticipated future increases in human influence on ecosystems and the associated health outcomes due to climate change-driven risk factors.

Genome by environment interactions may be particularly relevant at this scale of interaction. The region definition is appropriate to human movement patterns and thus exposure to sources of chronic and acute risk from disease and consumption patterns.

The land use type itself determines a wide variety of factors including interactions with other humans, livestock, dietary consumption, levels of hydration, energy intensity, and other factors.

Culture, ethnicity, and language are also important in response to land use and domestic patterns of consumption ranging from food use and taboos, communication of lifestyle and health options, provisioning of nutrition, water, and energy, availability, and the use of technology to process and maintain different lifestyle patterns.

In each of these regional definitions, the interactions between landscape and human activity affects affluence, access to health care, and political regulation which suggests that these are are other possible subdivisions since these regions correspond to human social, transport, technological, and social networks–especially in dense settlements versus villages and remote areas.

For these reasons, anthropogenic biomes may provide more of a mosaic-like image from which to base categorizations used by clinical and other studies of health compared to political and continental boundaries which conventionalize migration barriers and tribal relationships. Geographic and political definitions will slowly shift, leaving only historical genetic signatures. Furthermore, anthro biomes are not specific to any particular disease or health outcome. They may encompass suites of infection and disease patterning where behavior, exposure, risk, and land use are correlated. They may also be indicative of linked health outcomes at the physiological level where, for example, musculoskeletal disorders and endocrine system perturbations are bound by human-influenced ecosystem interactions.  Or they may suggest psychological correlates, linking cognition and landscape to disease and health risks.

The main point to consider is that ecological relationships, including land use and human infrastructure development, script behavior and consumption in ways that drive health outcomes. Understanding human influenced ecosystem patterns helps us identify areas of positive feedback between health risks, land use, population density, and the construction of everyday life.

References
Alessa, L., & Chapin, F. S. (2008). Anthropogenic biomes: a key contribution to earth-system science. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 23(10), 529–531.

Ellis, E. C., & Ramankutty, N. (2008). Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 6(8), 439–447.

HealthMap

A project called HealthMap (http://www.healthmap.org) makes epidemiological information available to all corners of the world via the web. As reported in the July issue of PLoS Medicine, it extracts, categorizes, filters and integrates a variety of Web-based data sources, even analyzing blogs, listservs, chatrooms, and online news reports as sources for monitoring global health.

The idea is that people’s discussion can serve as signals of disease outbreaks which can then be scraped and fed to a map…

Brownstein JS, Freifeld CC, Reis BY, Mandl KD (2008) Surveillance Sans Frontières: Internet-Based Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence and the HealthMap Project. PLoS Med 5(7): e151 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050151

This is an interesting report I came across from a UN-Vodaphone partnership designed to provide “research and recommendations on how to use technology and telecom tools to effectively address some of the world’s toughest challenges” (found via THDblog)

The story I was most interested in was Case Study 10: Environmental Monitoring with Mobile Phones (Ghana) carried out by Intel Research. I was struck by this paragraph, detailing the convergence of locative sensing and personal health status:

Another area for further exploration is the ability of mobile sensing to contribute to public health by linking health with environmental factors that have not been available before. For example, even though we know that there is a link between asthma symptoms and air pollution, previously it was not possible to directly correlate an individual’s symptoms with their exposure to air pollutants. Measuring people’s lung performance while measuring ambient air pollution exposure could shed new light on the links between air pollution and asthma, perhaps resulting in better treatments.

Clearly there are many thorny privacy concerns, but that’s the difficult (and fun) part to work out and begin to address.

Still, I think this example is on the mark in trying to link infrastructure, natural or man-made and population health patterns.