LIMITS 2024
Policy decisions relevant to the environment rely on tools like dashboards to provide information and data visualizations that enable decision-makers to make tradeoffs. Because all outcomes from policies relevant to climate change occur at a distance, decision-makers experience so-called ‘psychological distance’ to environmental decisions in terms of space, time, social identity, and hypotheticality. Since policy decisions to achieve a safe planetary space are urgently needed for immediate transition, we need a design practice that takes into account how psychological distance affects cognition and decision-making. Our paper explores the role of alternative design approaches in developing visualizations used for climate policymaking. Our paper lays out how future research on the impacts of alternative design approaches on psychological distance can make data used for policy decisions more tangible and visceral. In the paper, we synthesize literature from environmental psychology and social and cognitive psychology to explore how the design of decision tools can leverage approaches like speculative design and data visceralization to invoke affective responses to environmental decisions to help traverse psychological distance. It was accepted at the Tenth Workshop on Computing within Limits (LIMITS 2024). The paper can be found here and the recorded talk is available on YouTube.