At a high level, our goal for the week is to learn about, and practice, design research for the purposes of communicating complex risk information to different audiences. We will be using risk finance and insurance problem space, and the website for the Southeast Asia Disaster Risk Insurance Facility (SEADRIF)(to be launched soon) in particular to help narrow our task.
SEADRIF is a risk insurance pool between several countries in the region to provide quick access to response and recovery funds as well as technical assistance in the case of large flood events. The website is used to quickly understand potential flood impacts, based both on current remote sensing data and river guages as well as flood models that are based data about past flooding events.
We will use this website as a starting place and conduct some of the following kinds of activities, depending on the interests and ideas of the participants:
- Competitor analysis – What similar tools and flood mapping websites exist? What are their target audiences? What value do they provide to users? How do they convey complex data about flood risk and uncertainty?
- Heuristic evaluation – What best practices exist, both for web development and risk communication? How well does this site adopt those practices? What recommendations do we have for improving it?
- User research – What kinds of users is this site trying to reach? What value does it seek to provide them? Conduct interviws and usage analysis to understand how well it currently provides value to users.
- API design – A lot of really useful data goes into the models and visualizations on the SEADRIF platform. How can we make this data useful, in a variety of formats, to other users in the region?
This should be a lot of fun, we’ll get to learn about design research can support risk communication and disaster risk management goals, find and interact with potential users of flood information, and do a very deep analysis of an important source of risk information for the region.