June 06, 2009 –
Tomlinson hopes IT can help change human behavior.
Natural disasters like fires and earthquakes trigger an immediate response from the public. They rally quickly, offering shelter, money, food and clothing for the victims. Many also clear brush around their own homes, secure heavy furniture or purchase emergency supplies.
But what about longer-term disasters like climate change or sea-level rise? The consequences might be just as severe but the result is often indifference.
CALIT2 academic affiliate Bill Tomlinson and his UCI colleagues Brett Sanders and Robin Keller want to understand this phenomenon in order to enact change. The three professors – from informatics, civil and environmental engineering, and the business school, respectively – are collaborating on a project to investigate the causes of this apathy toward longer-term events and determine whether it can be altered with online visualization programs that provide enhanced understanding.
“Using IT to Compress Perceived Time and Space in How People Think About Global Change: A Step Towards Behavioral Change” is supported by a $38,000 grant from UCI’s Environment Institute and $10,000 from the university’s Urban Water Research Center.
“When we’re dealing with things like 50-year changes, there may not be an instant where it’s evident that we have to act now,” Tomlinson says. “We’re trying to understand some of the environmental science, psychological and interactive components of that problem.”
Each team member adds unique expertise to the multidisciplinary project. Sanders is an expert in coastal flooding which is expected to become more frequent and damaging as sea levels rise and weather systems intensify, and Keller specializes in behavioral analysis. Tomlinson’s proficiency in information technology will enable the group to create online programs that can help users connect to different consequences of sea-level rise in effective ways.
The final implementation is still uncertain, but Tomlinson envisions a “Google Earth”-type visualization. One idea is to allow users to “move” forward and backward in time so they can see the ramifications in a more personal way. Will local landmarks be under water? Will loved ones’ homes and businesses be affected? What will be the economic impact? “We’re hoping social networking will play a role,” he says. “If a friend-of-a-friend could be affected by sea-level rise, there may be more of an impact than if there’s no personal connection.”
The first step is to develop a series of prototypes, then track the behavior of a test group in response to follow-up questions. The researchers want to know if one visualization is more effective than another in changing the response of users.
The group will post their first prototypes on the Mechanical Turk Web site (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome), an Amazon site that gives users an opportunity to choose and complete tasks in exchange for a small payment.
After users have interacted with various visualizations, researchers will analyze their responses to questionnaires. “We want to get a sense for which visualizations have the greatest effect across a range of time horizons: 5 years, 20 years, 50 years, etc.,” says Tomlinson.
They hope to tailor some of the visualizations to policy-makers. “We’d like to help them understand that in order to avoid certain problems in 20 or 30 years they need to take certain actions now. We also hope to provide them with tools to help them explain their actions to their constituencies,” he adds.
“The ultimate goal is to have a real impact on the world. We’d like to figure out how to enable people to understand the long-term nature of environmental issues and realize that action in the present is necessary to avoid future problems.”
