Designing Drought Indicators

Abstract

Drought indicators hold great potential to assist water management. However, drought information products are traditionally designed by scientists with little input from the end users. This has resulted in an inundation of products ill suited to stakeholder needs and requirements, limiting the potential for improving management through the use of these products. In a different field—the field of product design—product designers and strategists have matured methodologies for optimizing the creation of material products, such as shoes and cars, for example, for customers. A multitude of design-centric strategies are employed to determine customer needs and requirements (e.g., lighter shoe, more cushioning, breathable, reflectivity, arch support, width options, color options). These approaches can be extended from material to information or data products. Here, we describe how the methodological approaches within the field of product design can be interdisciplinarily employed to data products for drought indicators, with water managers as end users (i.e., the “customers”). New results for drought data products may be transformative in how drought indices are constructed, communicated, and delivered, with potentially significant improvements for water management.

Understanding and managing connected extreme events

“…True coalescence around shared definitions, best practices and research priorities can only occur through sustained and in-depth conversations where sector experts, stakeholders, policymakers and practitioners meaningfully shape the research process from conceptualization to results to implementation. This process has been described by many terms, including 'co-production' 86,87 , 'joint problem formulation' 88 , 'co-development' 89 , 'design thinking' 90 and 'bottom-up approaches' 11 . The underlying principles are consistent: to identify critical constraints and interactions (from ethnography, expert solicitation, process-based impact models and/or systems analysis), and then to use these to iteratively formulate the questions that guide systematic study of the climate.…”

Reimagining futures

“…In the case of many large-scale environmental sensing platforms, such as satellites or meteorological networks, the absence of this engagement can limit the utility and reach of the data beyond the technical experts in the field. Figure 1 is similar to-and inspired by-Figure 2 from Purdy et al (2019), an indication that this augmentation of the scientific method has been proposed by other scientists and is a credible approach.…”

Demystifying Drought: Strategies to Enhance the Communication of a Complex Hazard

“…We relied on iterative and participatory processes to engage users and to ensure that we, as information producers, understood their contexts, needs, and preferences and could then apply that knowledge as we created new resources (Dilling and Lemos 2011;McNie 2013). Methods to facilitate this work included providing space for direct interactions between information providers and users (Alexander and Dessai 2019), collaborating with the target information users in the design of prototypes to promote learning and inquiry (Purdy et al 2019), and assessing the utility of information for users' actual decisions and contexts (Grainger et al 2020).…”

“…Second, recognizing that decision makers are most likely to understand and use information tailored to their contexts, significant work has been devoted to identifying users' needs and developing tools for their decisions and applications, particularly in the agriculture (e.g., Prokopy et al 2017), fire management (e.g., McEvoy et al 2019), and water management (e.g., Steinemann et al 2015) sectors. While this specialized nature of drought information provision is undoubtedly useful for decision makers working in those fields, information and products developed for one purpose may be difficult for non-experts or those working in other contexts to access, interpret, and utilize (Bachmair et al 2016;Hao and Singh 2015;Purdy et al 2019).…”