InfoCrisis.social: A Socially-powered Control Panel, with Javier Velasco and Gonzalo Bacigalupe
Channel: SustainableUX
Date: 2017-02-20

INFOCRISIS.SOCIAL: A socially-powered control panel to help communities face disruptive events by optimizing information and resource flow with 
Javier Velasco-Martin and Gonzalo Bacigalupe at SustainableUX 2017

 We present infocrisis.social, a platform that aggregates crisis related information to help individuals and communities to develop situational awareness in a country continuously exposed to natural threats. The platform combines governmental and mass media reports as well as real time social media information sources to provide communities with the most relevant info at each stage in a potential or actual disaster, generating lists, graphs and maps that allow users to make sense of such chaotic situations. The assumption that informs our citizen crowdsourcing project is based on the idea that communication and information are core in a crisis response. Information per se helps those at risk to take action in reducing the damage caused by natural hazards and participating in the distribution of vital information can help mitigate the psychosocial trauma elicited during a crisis.

This presentation will cover the discovery and design aspects of our UX process, we have conducted a series of co-design workshops and user feedback sessions. This project has also involved some compelling dimensions of information architecture such as the normalization of information from multiple sources. We will tell the story of the project from initial sketches and concept models, subsequent design workshops, the wireframing stages, and the development of prototypes.

Javier Velasco-Martin

Javier Velasco-Martin, PH.D. in Information Science, focuses on communication dynamics in ICTs. He was an early member of the global IA/UX community and pioneered the field in Latin America. With over 16 years of experience as UX researcher and designer in leading organizations in Chile and the US, he is currently postdoctoral researcher at CIGIDEN (www.cigiden.cl), a national research center focused on integrated disaster management.


Gonzalo Bacigalupe

Gonzalo Bacigalupe, EdD, MPH, is professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is principal investigator of the #ICT4D at the Research Center for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (CIGIDEN), senior invited faculty member in the doctoral program of the Catholic University of Chile in Valparaiso, and adjunct professor at the Catholic University of Chile School of Engineering. His research with colleagues in Chile, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, and the USA, focuses on the impact of emerging media adoption on families, the role of patient online communities, the use of social technologies to build community resilience during socionatural disasters, transnational families, and family health.