Co-designing grounded visualisations of the Food-Water-Energy nexus to enable urban sustainability transformations
Resumen
In the past few years, the Food-Water-Energy (FWE) Nexus has emerged as a key concept to address the complex relationships and interdependencies between food, water, and energy systems. Cities are an important context for understanding the FWE nexus given their significant footprints and complex socio-ecological systems, but researchers have only recently started to explore an explicit urban perspective on food, water, and energy interrelationships. This paper tackles a particularly significant knowledge gap in this context by introducing an approach to co-design visualisations of the FWE nexus that are understandable and actionable for the various stakeholders involved in urban governance such as citizens, communities, governments, non-governmental and private-sector organisations. Drawing on user-centred design and inspired by the dialogic pedagogy of Paulo Freire, we present and evaluate the co-design process of a FWE nexus visualisation tool for stakeholders engaged with pre-school education in Słupsk, Poland. Our results provide evidence that this co-design process has been effective to developing a new critical consciousness in the participants about how their everyday choices are related to the FWE nexus, enabling them to change perspectives, leading to more sustainable choices. We propose that our co-design process can be used to develop ‘grounded visualisations’ of the FWE nexus, i.e., visualisations that are grounded in the experiential situations and lived realities of stakeholders, thus offering an effective support for decision-making that could open pathways to sustainability transformations.
Carlos Cámara-Menoyo
Arquitecto. Doctor. Profesor. Aprendiz.
Mi formación mutidisciplinar y mis múltiples intereses de investigación se vertebran alrededor de las comodificaciones entre ciudad, tecnología y sociedad dentro del marco del informacionalismo y la cultura libre, aspectos que abordo tanto desde mi vertiente profesional académica como desde mi vertiente activista
João Porto de Albuquerque
Director of the Institute of Global Sustainable Development
Professor Porto de Albuquerque (IGSD, University of Warwick) is a geographer and computer scientist. His research adopts a transdisciplinary approach to digital geographies and geographic information science, intersecting urban data science, information management and development studies. His transdisciplinary research on socio-ecological-technical urban systems not only emphasises cross-border collaboration between the (environmental) sciences, social sciences and humanities; it also goes beyond academic disciplines to engage in co-production and participatory research with non-academic stakeholders.
Greg McInerny
Ass. Professor
Ass. Prof. Greg McInerny (CIM, University of Warwick) research focuses on Data/Information Visualisation, bringing software and sciences into relation with the arts, humanities and social sciences. His research works with ‘visualisation’ in four ways: 1) using visualisation as a research method, 2) visualisation design techniques and tools, 3) critical visualisation Studies, and 4) understanding visualisation in the real world. In combination, these sub topics offer a way into understanding ‘visualisation’ as a subject, as a set of methods and as an object, and through a variety of frames as user, tool designer/developer and critical researcher, and through understanding everyday relationships with visualisation.