On the Same Map
On the Same Map deploys gigamapping as a strategic tool for food security researchers to situate themselves within, and support, Pakistan’s policy response to its climate change-induced food security vulnerabilities.
design research
Ambition
How might we leverage participatory, systemic design approaches to identify gaps in Pakistan’s policy response to its climate change vulnerabilities and generate ideas for meaningful interventions?
Action
Along with my project partners, food security and climate change researchers with expertise on Pakistan, I conducted extensive exploratory and generative research over ten months. Interviews, informal conversations and design charrettes helped us piece together a picture of the actors, linkages and flows within the complex, dynamic and overlapping realms of climate change, food security and decision making in Pakistan. Faced with this complexity, we prototyped gigamapping as a process and a design outcome as a way for researchers to identify points of leverage and opportunities for intervention. Working in close collaboration with researchers, we prototyped and tested a virtual, collaborative gigamapping process and an interactive platform to analyze the generated maps.
Roles and skills
Interviews
Workshop design and facilitation
User stories and personas
Wireframing
Prototyping
Generative research
Outcome
The process of creating maps and the maps themselves have revealed a number of valuable insights about the roles of ministries, funding organizations, and research institutes among other actors. The maps highlight gaps in knowledge as well as inadequate connections between key stakeholders. An interactive map prototype has also received promising feedback as ‘orientation tools’ that can help new researchers and policymakers get an overview of the complex landscape.
Context
Pakistan is the fifth-most vulnerable country to the long-term effects of anthropogenic climate change. In addition to posing other pressing challenges, climate change also threatens the bedrock of Pakistan’s economy and society: agriculture. This in turn compromises the country’s ability to feed its population of over 200 million. While a number of promises, projects and policies have been initiated by governmental and private actors, experts contend that the country remains unprepared to effectively address its climate change-induced food security vulnerabilities. They identify factors such as lack of effective collaboration between stakeholders, wavering political will, gaps in policy enforcement, and confusion arising from the devolution of powers as a result of the eighteenth amendment, as contributors to this lack of preparedness.
This project explores the use of systemic design—an emerging practice at the intersection of systems thinking and design thinking—to help researchers get a deeper understanding of the actors, linkages and flows within the complex, dynamic and overlapping realms of climate change, food security and decision making in Pakistan, allowing them to play a strategic role in the country’s response to its challenges arising from climate change.
Research
10 months
of exploratory, generative and assessment research
15 interviews
engaging representatives from government, academia and research, donor agencies and community organizations.
3 charrettes
featuring collaborative gigamapping activities
“There’s not enough research-policy collaboration.”
— Research professional
“The eighteenth amendment is a mess.”
— Academic
“The government is spending a lot on mega projects, [but] it’s difficult to know what the real impact of these projects is.”
— Representative from Non-governmental Organization
To further illustrate our understanding of the complex landscape, we conducted two virtual charrettes using Mural and Zoom. The first charrette led to rich learnings in the form of participant-created stakeholder maps. Following reflection on the outcomes of the first charrette, we organized another one in which we mapped out specific topics identified in the first research phase, such as the issues and opportunities in communicating research and technical information to decision makers (from the perspective of food policy researchers)
We used design fictions to help charrette participants adopt a generative, creative mindset towards generating ideas to make fictitious, favorable future scenarios a reality. The ficitons included a news story and a United Nations report from the year 2030. Both represent a favorable scenario in which Pakistan has not only overcome its food security challenges, but is also being hailed as a leader and an example for other countries to follow. This detail shows the fictitious news story lauding specific actions and policies that helped Pakistan overcome its food security vulnerabilities. Dawn, a highly regarded publication, is Pakistan’s newspaper of record.
Design opportunities
Through literature, interviews, informal conversations and design charrettes, we pieced together a picture of the immense complexity that characterizes climate change and food security decision making in Pakistan. We identified several apparent design opportunities, such as improving research communication or clarifying the role of the eighteenth amendment.
But we realized that before we could initiate any design interventions, we had to develop a deeper, richer and broader understanding of the landscape, not just for ourselves but also for the our constituents who, despite being active participants of the network, still had difficulty understanding parts of it.
We realized that we had to, as Ezio Manzini puts it, “make things visible and tangible”. Manzini maintains that “designers can contribute to making ecosystems more ready for active, collaborative and sustainable behavior not by changing the state of things, but by making them visible first.” (Manzini 2015)
![Net-map of “Who influences agricultural water management policy at the national level? [in Pakistan].“ (Aberman et al. 2013)](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fc32a729698b02c7f2f5d7d/1617164501662-OYK7FP6YUTJ6WXZZO7T0/Aberman+et+al.+2013+net-map+ifpri+pakistan.png)
Net-map of “Who influences agricultural water management policy at the national level? [in Pakistan].“ (Aberman et al. 2013)
A gigamap of the different types of systemic relations. (Young Eun Choi, Birger Sevaldson, AHO 2013)
Food security researchers have previously made the networks of actors and their interconnections visible and tangible in the form of net-maps—complex, in-depth mappings of interactions and relationships. While net-maps capture rich and relevant information and can “help users understand the flows of knowledge and the formal and informal ways in which policy decisions are made” (Schiffer 2007), the way they are primarily presented (as static, low-resolution images) makes them hard to decipher and “get much out of” (research participant).
On the other hand, Gigamaps are incredibly detailed maps of complex sociotechnical systems. It therefore makes sense to deploy animation and interaction to support analysis and understanding of these maps, something Birger Sevaldson, the pioneer of gigamapping, notes in his 2011 paper. Following this cue, we developed interactive prototypes of the gigamaps generated in our design charrette.
While trying to understand how gigamaps were different from other approaches to mapping, I made this diagram, based on my correspondence with Professor Sevaldson, who indicated that there’s no clear line as to what is a gigamap vs not.
Design outcomes
Initial sketch prototypes
We explored the layout and functionality of an interactive gigamapping platform, nicknamed Mappy, through low-fidelity sketch prototypes
Key Learnings
The gigamap laid out the complex network of actors and linkages that characterizes the food security and climate change policymaking landscape in Pakistan
This can be problematic because the donors tend to be seen as promoting one-size fits all policies which might not necessarily be suited to the context in Pakistan.
Although this map is concerned with the flow of research in the space of food security decision making, the circle representing the MNFSR, the federal ministry dedicated to ensuring the country’s food security, is rather isolated, with few inflows and just one outflow. Discussing this fact, participants brought up the Eighteenth Amendment, which devolved certain ministries from the federal to the provincial level, including those in agriculture and health. Participants noted that with provinces controlling their own policies and strategies in key areas such as agriculture, the MNFSR actually does not have a lot of leverage in the country’s food security decision making. In highlighting these limitations, the participants also acknowledged that they don’t know the workings of the ministry well enough, underscoring once again a key premise of this research project: people working within the area have trouble grasping the complex interplay between stakeholders, and policies and flows of authority and knowledge.
Similar to the insight about the role of the Ministry of Food Security, there is lack of clarity about the role of other entities, such as agriculture departments.
A key discovery was the limits to researchers’ knowledge and understanding of the landscape, a fact acknowledged by the researchers and highlighted by a number of pink diamonds indicating a need for more research. Having mapped out the flow of research and technical information between the stakeholders, the participants noted that they had reached a point where they weren’t able to add more information to the map on their own. This is a fascinating discovery: gigamapping can help researchers identify the gaps in their knowledge and seek collaboration with other stakeholders such as government departments.
Another finding was the lack of outflows from certain presumably important actors. The Ministry of Planning, Development and Special Initiatives, for example, is the destination of several brown arrows, representing technical information and research, but few arrows originate from the Ministry. Participants noted that while there might very well be outgoing arrows that people with more information about the organization and the broader system can point out, they didn’t have enough information to draw these connections. This also suggested that our research participants did not have a big-picture view of their work: while they contribute rigorous research to the Ministry of Planning, they don’t know if and how this research impacts national policymaking, something the Ministry plays an important role in.
Participant feedback
“For somebody who doesn't know a lot of these things, I think this would get them up to speed pretty quickly.”
— Seasoned researcher and author
“I like this idea…something like this would have been useful in trying to understand the fertilizer gas subsidy landscape.”
— Food security expert
Future Work
We are currently testing and iterating prototypes for this ongoing project. We are also building a gigamapping toolkit for researchers to use in their own work.
