too hard for average people to acquire intuitions about the relationship between the CCHI, its constituent factors and subfactors, and the actual habitability of a particular place.

The CCHI interaction design affords a view of the habitability of a place in accordance with the summarization of the five main risk factors. The CCHI interaction design can also display the habitability of a place in accordance with a sub-selection of the risk factors. For instance, in Figure 3 the map expands only the water risk factor apropos of four detailed risk subfactors, namely freshwater systems, drought, flood, and drinking water availability.

Simple design. In constructing a design for the CCHI and initial notions of interactivity, we want to choose the simplest possible representations we can think of. There is a lot of data available, and assessing the actual habitability of a particular location in terms of risks associated with climate change is a tremendously complex and intricate calculation. Our goal here is to hide all this complexity inasmuch as it is possible to do so. We chose to use color to denote degree of risk, using typical semantics of green through red hues. As we have mentioned, grayscale may also be substituted as a matter of accessibility without loss of semantics.

Time and temperature. Another two essential features of CCHI are time and degrees of warming (or cooling). Our purpose is to allow people to see historical trends and future predictions about how climate change affects our Earth over periods of time. People need to be able to see what the Earth may look like when the average temperature increases by a specific amount, which in the IPCC summary diagrams ranges from 0 to 6 degrees Celsius of warming [ 2]. Two degrees Celsius of warming is generally considered to be the tipping point. Figure 4 illustrates as a matrix the space of what needs to be represented apropos of time and degrees of warming historically and in prediction as underlying data to support the interactivity. Based on the assumptions of the IPCC reports, we define year 2000 to be the base point and set the temperature change to be 0 for 2000, relative to the period from 1980–1999 [ 2].

Crowdsourcing. One primary goal of the CCHI is to target a wider audience than climate scientists, local policy holders, planners, and managers—namely individuals in the general public and societal groups at various levels, from civic groups and municipal officials to regional, national, and international bodies. We also hope

to include formal scientific data sources as well as crowdsource reporting and the wiki-style editing of data about global habitability conditions. The latter form of data collection risks confidence in the data compared to peer-reviewed reporting by the scientific community, but so long as such contributions are clearly demarcated, they also have the benefit of involving the public, raising awareness, and prompting debate.

Summary

The program of research and practice that has evolved in our interaction design and HCI community around sustainability is important and promising work. We need to augment our efforts to also focus on adaptation in the face of the likelihood of climate change regardless of our efforts to mitigate such changes. This initial design sketch of the CCHI is one step in this direction.

As always, if you are engaged in interaction design or HCI research related to adaptation to climate change, kindly consider contributing to this forum.

—Eli Blevis, Editor

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the valuable discussions about the CCHI we had with Beth Plale, Paul Dantilio, and Shunying Blevis.

About the AuthorS Yue Pan is a doctoral student in the Human-Computer Interaction Design program at Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing. She has a background in computer science, and her area of research is sustainable interaction design.

Chit Meng Cheong is a master’s student in the Human Computer Interaction Design program in the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University Bloomington. He works in the field of sustainable interaction design.

Eli Blevis is an associate professor of informatics in
the Human-Computer Interaction Design program
of the School of Informatics and Computing at
Indiana University, Bloomington. His primary area of
research—sustainable interaction design—and his
core expertise are situated within the confluence of
human-computer interaction as it owes to the computing and cogni-
tive sciences, and design as it owes to the reflection of design criti-
cism and the practice of critical design. His research also engages
design theory, digital photography, and studio-based learning.

November + December 2010

DOI: 10.1145/1865245.1865253
© 2010 ACM 1072-5220/10/1100 $10.00