Planners would call the challenge of minimizing the impacts of large-scale energy development on landscapes a “wicked” problem—many systems interacting with each other, the outcomes are uncertain and the implications are ambiguous (Rittel and Webber, 1973). Solving such problems is further confounded; the multiple scientists, policy-makers and citizens engaged in seeking solutions are unfamiliar with each others’ core principles, values, methods and ways to assess success. While the science of such problems is critical to finding solutions, so is the social, political and cultural milieu in which the problems are situated.  Solutions will not emerge until all facets are addressed simultaneously and with equal seriousness (Young and Steffen, 2009; Chapin et al., 2011.)

Our goals are to empower citizen participants to be able to fully participate alongside industry experts, regulatory agency personnel, scientists and policy-makers, and to ensure that all participants in futures planning can:

1. through participation engage citizens and domain experts so that they develop comprehension and empathy for the issues that other “experts” face;
2. gather problem-relevant information at local through regional scale, whether that be geological data or oral and historical narratives;
3. interpret, understand and describe that information, as well as its limitations;
4. increase understanding on the part of industry experts, regulatory agency personnel, scientists and policy-makers as to how, when and where science can be helpful in solving societal problems.

What is the participatory interface through which stakeholders from non-technical backgrounds best approach, comprehend and participate in planning for gas development?  There is guidance available.  Vervoort et al. (2014) worked with mixed groups of media designers and complex system scientists to develop ways to communicate about climate change–different but with the same sorts of complexities as planning for gas development.  The results fell into three categories: storytelling; system exploration games; and group interactions, each of which had an important and complementary role in communication.  Storytelling relies on metaphor and narrative to make complex system interactions meaningful as well as conveying participants’ roles in those systems.  System exploration games convey complexity and interaction in engaging ways but fail to capture the individual perspectives and contributions of participants.  Group interactions, which may include role-playing exercises, enable the expression and testing of individuals’ values against one another but may not scale up to include large numbers or wide ranges of individuals.

Vervoort and colleagues’ results offer guidance for the development of a participatory and communications window to geodesign.  None of the three components mentioned above is new to environmental decision-making although there are few examples of all three coming together in a single setting.  Each may suffer from being perceived as play-like, informal and not sufficiently serious for the important tasks at hand.  Orland et al. (2014), observed the challenge of engaging scientists and managers in serious games enjoying broad adoption among other office workers.

Storytelling:  The geography literature is rich with examples of storytelling as a means of discovering community values, of negotiating differences in values, and of envisioning the future (Cameron, 2012; Lorimer and Parr, 2014.)   Stories connect the experience of the individual in the landscape to the circumstances and environments around them and convey meaning rather than simply location and physical composition.  Cameron reviews the role of storytelling in expressing values and power relationships and leading to policy.  Of particular use to landscape architecture is increased attention to small local stories.  The stories of land occupation and the activities of daily life are the settings within which decision-making about landscape change should occur.  Mikhailovich, (2009) and Paquet, (2013) describe community discourse in the context of wicked problems. For Mikhailovich the explicit embodiment of community, government and industry values to build trust in an ecosystem approach may have provided ways to address future water security needs.

System exploration games: Discovering how landscape systems work is essential to meaningful participation in landscape design and planning, and thus geodesign.  Umphlett et al. (2009) and Brock and Deckert (2008) are among numerous authors who point to the value of games for exploring ecosystem dynamics.  Daniel (2014) provides a number of examples used to teach engineering principles and Marlowe (2012) describes the pedagogical benefits of games as means to environmental design teaching.  Although not described as a game, Metcalf et al. (2010) describe the development of an exploratory model of the Mississippi watershed based on STELLA (ISEE Systems, 2006) that has the characteristics of a game to educate stakeholders in ecosystem behavior.  Orland and colleagues (1997) exploited that connection for a museum game exploring the relationship between forest structure and wildlife populations.  The connection to STELLA is additionally important in that numerous environmental system models are already available in that environment (e.g., Costanza, 1998; Costanza and Voinov, 2001.)  System exploration games will be essential components of a “front end” to geodesign.

Group interactions:  Role-playing games have been in use for many years for investigation of policy interventions in landscape planning—for managing and learning from the group interactions that occur as participants seek consensus among competing views and values (Duke, 2011.)  Although some key computer-based tools emerged, e.g., METROPOLIS (Duke, 1966) and METRO-APEX (McGinty, 1985) there is a surprising dearth of such aids currently, although the communication processes may have replaced by the internet and tools such as GoogleDocs.  MacIntyre (2003) used a board game to demonstrate landscape design principles in Australia; Pak and Castillo-Brieva (2010) used similar games to engage local peoples in understanding the factors driving landscape transformation in Colombia; and Speelman and colleagues (2014) used a similar approach for land-use planning in an agricultural landscape in Mexico.  In our own work (Orland and Murtha, 2015) we have made extensive and effective use of a felt-board game [1]to educate citizens about the planning processes in natural gas development.

[1] Created by Caitlin Smith, O2 Planning + Design Inc., Calgary.  MLA, Penn State, 2012.

The key elements of the MarcellusByDesign participatory design interface that we propose are as noted above:  expository storytelling, exploratory games and group interactions but with an addition.

In a lightning talk at Geodesign 2014, Orland (2014) suggested a three-part introduction to design comprising a narrative story, an exploratory serious game and a browsing library of past design projects as a means to engage and educate participants about system fundamentals and then convey the range of possible design questions participants might ask of a technical geodesign support system.  Now, and reflected in this website, we propose a four-part melding of these two sets of ideas.  Represented in this website, marcellusbydesign.psu.edu, the model comprises story-telling, explanatory games, exploratory games and a browsing library.  The browsing library on this website comprises story maps, projects, and focused studies.

Serious games (Bishop, 2011; Chang, 2011) provide a linking framework for integration of these four elements in stakeholder engagement and participation, all in a richly visual, interactive and engaging environment. A game-like approach also facilitates deployment of environmental analyses via mobile devices (e.g., Dogbey et al., 2014; Ferster and Coops 2014), enabling participation to take place in place, in situ, and in real life, in vivo, in the environments at issue. Game-like interaction with environmental issues via virtual technologies engages viewers in visits to worlds that may represent incremental successive changes to our existing environment, or dramatic and visionary new designed futures. Augmented virtual worlds combine a partial representation of the concrete world, overlaid by a virtual world diagram selected to present the key operations of the setting so that participants directly experience and learn the scientific principles on which they are constructed. The ability to interact with these worlds, and hear as well as see information that might otherwise be hidden, will lead to experiences with greater ecological validity than images alone, and hence more meaningful contribution to community decision-making (e.g., Bishop, 2015; Harwood et al., 2015; Schroth et al., 2015; Sheppard, 2015.)

See these additional resources:

Bishop, I. 2011.  Landscape planning is not a game: Should it be? Landscape and Urban Planning 100(4), 390-392.

Bishop, I. 2015. Location based information to support understanding of landscape futures, Landscape and Urban Planning (142) 120-131.

Brock, W. A., & Dechert, W. D. (2008). The polluted ecosystem game. Indian Growth and Development Review.  1(1), 7-31.

Cameron, E. (2012). New geographies of story and storytelling. Progress in Human Geography.  36(5), 573-592.

Chang, A.Y. 2011. Games as environmental texts. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 19(2), 57-84.

Chapin III, F. Stuart, S. Pickett, M. Power, R. Jackson, D. Carter, and C. Duke. 2011. Earth stewardship: A strategy for social–ecological transformation to reverse planetary degradation, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences1 (1): 44-53.

Costanza, R., & Gottlieb, S. (1998). Modelling ecological and economic systems with STELLA: Part II. Ecological Modelling, 112(2), 81-84.

Costanza, R., & Voinov, A. (2001). Modeling ecological and economic systems with STELLA: Part III. Ecological Modelling, 143(1), 1-7.

Daniel, A. (2014)  GAME ON!  ASEE Prism.  23(8), 41.

Dogbey, J., C. Quigley, M. Che, and J. Hallo. 2014. Using Smartphone Technology in Environmental Sustainability Education: The Case of the Maasai Mara Region in Kenya. International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 6(1), 1-16.

Duke, R. D. (1966) M.E.T.R.O. A gaming simulation. East Lansing: Michigan State University, Institute for Community Development.

Ferster, C.J. and N.C. Coops. 2014. Assessing the quality of forest fuel loading data collected using public participation methods and smartphones. International Journal of Wildland Fire. (23) 585–590.

Harwood, A., A. Lovett and J, Turner. 2015. Customising virtual globe tours to enhance community awareness of local landscape benefits, Landscape and Urban Planning. (142) 106-119.

ISEE Systems. (2006) Technical document for iThink and STELLA software.  http://www.iseesystems.com

Lorimer, H., & Parr, H. (2014). Excursions – telling stories and journeys. Cultural Geographies, 21(4), 543-547.

MacIntyre, S. (2003)  The Landscape Game: A learning tool demonstrating landscape design principles.  Ecological Management and Restoration.  4(2), 103-109.

Marlowe, C. M. (2012). Making games for environmental design education: Revealing landscape architecture. International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, 4(2), 60-83.

Metcalf, S. S., Wheeler, E., BenDor, T. K., Lubinski, K. S., & Hannon, B. M. (2010) Sharing the floodplain: Mediated modeling for environmental management. Environmental Modelling and Software. 25(11), 1282-1290.

McGinty, R. T. (1985). METRO/APEX. Los Angeles: University of Southern California, School of Public Administration.

Mikhailovich, K. (2009). Wicked water: Engaging with communities in complex conversations about water recycling. EcoHealth, 6(3), 324-330.

Orland, B., Ogleby, C., Campbell, H., & Yates, P.  (1997)  Multi-media approaches to visualization of ecosystem dynamics. ASPRS/ACSM/RT’97 -Seattle, American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Washington, DC. (4) 224-236.

Orland, B., N. Ram, D. H. Lang, K.W. Houser, M. Coccia & N. Kling.  2014.  Saving Energy in an Office Environment: A Serious Game Intervention.  Energy and Buildings. 74:43-52. ISSN 0378-7788, DOI: 10.1016/j.enbuild.2014.01.036. See also:  http://youtu.be/6B_ID9qhAvg.

Paquet, G. (2013) Wicked policy problems and social learning. Optimum Online, 43(3)19.

Rittel, H. and M.M. Webber. 1973. Dilemmas in a general theory of planning, Policy Sciences 4 (2): 155-69.

Schroth, O., E. Pond, and S.R.J. Sheppard. 2015. Evaluating presentation formats of local climate change in community planning with regard to process and outcomes, Landscape and Urban Planning. DOI:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2015.03.011.

Sheppard, S. 2015. Making climate change visible: A critical role for landscape professionals, Landscape and Urban Planning (142) 95-105.

Speelman, E. N., García-Barrios, L. E., Groot, J. C. J., & Tittonell, P. (2014). Gaming for smallholder participation in the design of more sustainable agricultural landscapes. Agricultural Systems, 126, 62-75.

Steinitz, C. (2013) A Framework for Geodesign: Changing Geography by Design.  Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc. Redlands, CA.

Umphlett, N., Brosius, T., Laungani, R., Rousseau, J., & Leslie-Pelecky, D. (2009). Ecosystem jenga! Science Scope, 33(1), 57-60.

Vervoort, J. M., D. H. Keuskamp, K. Kok, R. v. Lammeren, T. Stolk, T. A. Veldkamp, and H. Rowlands. 2014. A sense of change: Media designers and artists communicating about complexity in social-ecological systems, Ecology and Society 19(3): 1.

Young, O. and W. Steffen. 2009. The Earth System: Sustaining planetary life support systems, In, F.S. Chapin, G.P. Kofinas and C. Folke (eds.), Principles of Ecosystem Stewardship: Resilience-Based Natural Resource Management in a Changing World, Springer, New York: 295-315.

Directly relevant to MarcellusByDesign:

Orland, B. 2014.  Engaged Geodesign in the Forgotten Quarter of Pennsylvania.  Geodesign, Redlands, CA.  http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/geodesign14/

Orland, B. and T. Murtha. 2015. Show me: Engaging citizens in planning for shale gas development. Environmental Practice 17(4): 245-255. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1466046615000290.

Geodesign: Planning for Marcellus gas development

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Geodesign: Planning for Marcellus gas development