WaterSIMmersive

The grant team at ASU has been working with rural and tribal communities to obtain IRB approval for water story interviews and exhibit evaluation. Game development will follow a transactional UX design process, which includes the following interactive stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. As part of the Empathize stage, we will hire rural and American Indian students who Drs. Hale and Lauer will train and mentor to gather water stories from people in their home communities. Participants will receive $50 Amazon gift cards and we will collect 15-20 stories per site during site visits in year one. We will use TheirStory software to preserve rural and urban waterstories, and Labriola will set up databases to manage the storage and dissemination of all tribal stories collected. We will be able to begin informed game development more immediately in year one by consulting the We Are Water project website, a previously-funded AISL project whose researchers we are collaborating with to co-host our very different museum exhibits in Page, AZ in an effort to compare exhibit approaches and extend the reach of both our efforts. We will also consult other sources of community perceptions about water such as the Walton Water and Climate Survey (2020), the American Public Media Water Main Survey report “How Americans Relate to Water” (2018), and White et al. (2019). As part of the Define stage, we will code gathered waterstory and survey data and use that data to develop personas of museum visitors. We will hire an interface designer and programmer to begin work on the game development. The Ideate stage will entail brainstorming game flow scenarios, scripts, and exhibit board content and design.

The Prototype stage will begin year two and involve sketching, wireframing, and prototyping gameplay. We will Test basic usability issues of the prototypes in a lab environment and at sites around ASU (e.g. ASU’s Night of the Open Door, which invites community members to visit ASU campuses and learn about the projects being developed there), and will continue to improve the designs before deploying the game to our first major host site, the Arizona Science Center, in the latter half of the year. We will continue to iterate on the design, content, and flow of the surrounding exhibit panels. Dr. Lauer will run experiments on data visualization comprehension to refine the style and delivery of visualized data in both the game and exhibit. We will begin pilot testing at the exhibit we set up at the Arizona Science Center and will finalize and polish up the WaterSIMmersive game for expanded deployment in year three. We will develop a project website to showcase collected stories and other drought-related content. We will work with host tribal and rural communities to develop programming and supplementary material to accompany exhibit deployment.

In year three we will deploy exhibits to a pair of sites in the East region of Arizona for one four-month span (Bullion Cultural Center and Museum in Miami-Globe and the Fort Apache Heritage Museum on the White Mountain Apache Reservation) followed by a second pair of sites in the West region of Arizona for another four-month span (Lake Havasu History Museum and the Colorado River Tribal Museum). We will travel to the communities to open and close the exhibits and facilitate community programming and museum-based research. We will run quasi-experimental pilot studies. Iterative development of K-20 supplemental educational materials will be informed by a half-day workshop we host with teachers from rural and tribal communities.

In year four we will follow the same process and deploy exhibits to a pair of sites in the North region of Arizona for one four-month span (Page Library and Navajo Nation location) followed by a second pair of sites in the South region of Arizona (Bisbee and Tohono O’Odham Cultural Center & Museum). We will run quasi-experimental pilot studies as well as send out long-term follow-up assessments. Iterative development of K-20 supplemental educational materials will continue during a second half-day workshop we host with teachers from rural and tribal communities We will disseminate research and development findings to conferences, journals, and informal science centers and community venues.