Applying Interaction Design to Improve Decision Support in Urban Watershed Management

Over the past decade, advances in urban drainage modeling, continuous monitoring, and active control have transformed the way engineers and decision makers think about the future of urban watersheds. These new technologies have the potential to reduce flooding and improve water quality, but only if they are adopted in the real world. Yet, as urban water systems are outfitted with new sensors, actuators, and modeling tools, human operators are faced with the task of leveraging increasingly large amounts of data to take actions in a complex, growing decision space. As a result, opportunities for intelligent control and cross-system cooperation are being missed, even where the technology is in place to make them possible.

Towards the goal of improved urban watershed function via informed and cooperative decision-making, we have developed a set of guidelines for communicating data to urban watershed operators. These guidelines are based on an ongoing interaction design collaboration with the Great Lakes Water Authority and their sewer and stormwater customers within Southeast Michigan, US. As part of our interaction design methodology, we are conducting an ongoing series of interviews with water managers across the region to examine how they use the data tools currently available to them. One outcome of this process is a weather forecast dashboard, designed iteratively based on operator feedback, that synthesizes many existing data sources into a single webpage. The guidelines developed through this user study are presented to inform development of new data and decision tools, reducing the barriers to adoption in real-world water infrastructure systems.