Atlas NW - Background

Interactive tools for sustainable development

Applications

These are interesting times for interactive sustainability tools. On the political side, there is the new city-regional agenda, public participation and interactive techniques for planning, surveys, visioning etc. On the research side, there are new concepts of integrated assessment and systems modelling. On the technical side, the advances in web technology and digital databasing over the last decade now open up new possibilities.

The Eco-quest NW has been designed for a variety of users:

  • Public users: open access to themes, priorities and possibilities
  • Policy users: generating a broad picture of the future of the region
  • Technical users: focusing on the analysis of urban development

Educational users may access any of these, depending on skills and interests. The system also works with user inputs on different levels:

  • Values & priorities: underlying social and cultural factors
  • Lifestyle choices: where personal and social preferences are highlighted
  • Policy issues such as land-use planning: either as what should happen, or what is likely to happen

One of the most interesting features is that different user inputs can be contradictory - many people will input wants, needs, hopes, and fears, which all appear to conflict.

This is simply a reflection of the complexity of society and the human psyche. A portion of such complexity can be represented by the software, which deliberately contains different levels of input and feedback.

The best application is therefore in an interactive workshop forum setting, where users can debate and bounce off each other. Such workshops can be focused either -

  • Visioning mode, i.e. exploring future possibilities
  • Action mode, i.e. working backwards from desired or undesirable futures to present day actions

Where an interactive workshop is not possible, the individual user on the web can explore, contemplate, dig out further information, follow the links, and so on. For web users, an interactive feedback system is in preparation. This will enable automatic logging of user choices for further analysis.