Human Interaction and Human factors driving future EIS/EDSS developments

Convenors: Steve Frysinger, Daryl Hepting

Environmental Informatics (or enviromatics) is a maturing subject with interdisciplinary roots. The application of information and communication technology (ICT) to the environment is an important way to understand and address the health of our planet.

Both the collection and utilization of environmental data must be democratized so that all citizens can participate in decision-making at all scales. These may include cloud-based platforms that support visual analytics to explore global-scale databases in personally meaningful ways, mobile solutions that allow effective participation in citizen science and contribution to international databases, and handheld solutions to interacting with local data. Underlying the larger benefits of enviromatics as a tool for policy decisions is the architecture that enables those decision-making processes. To maximize the value of the enviromatics infrastructure, interaction design must be an integral part of the architectural plan. From a citizen’s perspective, can ICT help with specific decisions and with placement of those decisions in an appropriate context for action? We seek to put work on interaction design and human computer interaction into the context of enviromatics, with the goal of understanding how to draw on and apply existing knowledge to enviromatics so that efforts are focused on refinement and adaptation instead of reinvention. Topics include, but are not limited to: usability analyses; decision psychology; task analyses (including, for example, decision support); validation of ICT tools; human-computer interface design; and human performance evaluation. In each of these, we encourage consideration of various platforms, from mobile smartphones to the cloud.