Collaborative platform to facilitate engineering decision-making

Abstract

Measures taken to address climate change and sustainability, more generally, imply a major reconfiguration of infrastructure systems and the built environment. Action across so many functions necessarily involves a range of organisations that may have differing priorities and motivations. This paper presents the concept of a decision theatre and describes how this approach was tested by co-designing, with a range of stakeholders, two events to identify the current vulnerabilities of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne to a storm event and to investigate the effectiveness of adaptation options to surface water flooding. The collaborative environment improved understanding of the physical and social vulnerabilities in the city, defined research questions relevant to society, improved the consideration of policy suggestions grounded in reality and improved the joint ownership of the issues and the facility itself. The lessons learned helped develop a long-term vision for a more widely applicable research and engagement facility for exploring and understanding decision-making with a range of stakeholders, including the general public.

Multi-Criteria Decision Making for Sustainability and Value Assessment in Early PSS Design

“…An important aspect in the implementation of the proposed approach is the opportunity of creating a physical environment [52] where the design team can learn about the long-term consequences of their designs, so to improve timeliness and quality of design decisions at gate meetings. This is inspired by the concept of decision theatre (DT) [53].…”

What Makes Decentralised Energy Storage Schemes Successful? An Assessment Incorporating Stakeholder Perspectives

“…We followed a participatory approach to the design and implementation of the research, using aspects of deliberative workshop and decision theatre methods [31,32] to investigate the issues of deployment of DES technologies from an innovative perspective.…”

Are wildcard events on infrastructure systems opportunities for transformational change?

“…Following the methodological approach and analysis described above, the lessons learned regarding the value of wildcard events were used to design a series of workshops in a 'Decision Theatre' setting (Walsh et al, 2013). Such events allow decision-makers to critically reflect upon potential outcomes of a range of models or scenarios (Mendonça et al, 2004;Steinmueller, 2011).…”