User-driven design of decision support systems for polycentric environmental resources management

Another result from the Mountain-EVO project has been published in Environmental Modelling and Software. The paper was led by Zed Zulkafli, former postdoc at Imperial College and now Lecturer at Universiti Putra Malaysia. The paper presents and a participatory framework for designing decision-support systems that builds on understanding the decision making processes and on iterative design of the user interface. The framework is illustrated with a Peruvian case study.

User-driven design of decision support systems for polycentric environmental resources management

Open and decentralized technologies such as the Internet provide increasing opportunities to create knowledge and deliver computer-based decision support for multiple types of users across scales. However, environmental decision support systems/tools (henceforth EDSS) are often strongly science-driven and assuming single types of decision makers, and hence poorly suited for more decentralized and polycentric decision making contexts. In such contexts, EDSS need to be tailored to meet diverse user requirements to ensure that it provides useful (relevant), usable (intuitive), and exchangeable (institutionally unobstructed) information for decision support for different types of actors. To address these issues, we present a participatory framework for designing EDSS that emphasizes a more complete understanding of the decision making structures and iterative design of the user interface. We illustrate the application of the framework through a case study within the context of water-stressed upstream/downstream communities in Lima, Peru.

Zulkafli, Z., Perez, K., Vitolo, C., Buytaert, W., Karpouzoglou, T., Dewulf, A., … Shaheed, S. (2017). User-driven design of decision support systems for polycentric environmental resources management. Environmental Modelling & Software, 88, 58–73. 

The is open access and can be downloaded from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2016.10.012