SAI-P: Integrating Human Behavioral Uncertainty in Participatory Design of Infrastructure in Watersheds

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Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.Watershed management is a top priority for the nation. The management of watersheds must attend to floods, droughts, water quality, and ecological systems. Such management is shifting from centralized gray infrastructure solutions (dams, reservoirs, water-wastewater treatment plants) to approaches that incorporate decentralized and nature-based infrastructure solutions (wetlands, grassed waterways, stream buffers, rain gardens, green roofs). This SAI planning project examines how watershed communities can influence the design of nature-based infrastructure and how the design of such infrastructure can be inclusive of different stakeholders. The design of nature-based infrastructure is most effective when implemented as an interconnected network of landscape practices at multiple geographic locations across the entire rural and urban terrain. This process requires a deep understanding of the physical and biological laws that govern how water is stored, regulated, and routed in the natural and built environments of the watershed, and of the perceptual and cognitive processes related to watershed stakeholders who influence what type of infrastructure solutions are implemented and where. This planning project develops such understanding to enable a holistic, sustainable, and resilient watershed management approach.This SAI planning project focuses on mathematical and computational frameworks for characterizing and coping with behavioral uncertainty in participatory design of nature-based infrastructure at watershed-scales. The project investigates the role of diverse perceptual and cognitive processes utilized when people interact with digital visualization interfaces during design of nature-based infrastructure. It also develops novel, computational and interactive participatory design methods based on modeling approaches for coping with behavioral and physical uncertainty in the design of climate-resilient solutions at watershed-scales. The project draws on theory and research on human-centered interactive optimization for watershed systems, perceptual and cognitive psychology, and multi-model approaches for adaptive control. The planning activity includes data collection and workshops to develop a use-inspired research plan to support fast, accurate, and adaptive participatory design in watershed communities.This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences, the Directorate for Geosciences, and the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.