Marcia Smith, Oliver Bates, and Adrian Friday
In this paper we present and discuss our experiences of using gigamap in our research to reimagine more sustainable futures for Digital Research Infrastructures (DRI) of Environmental Science. Understanding the positive and negative socio-environmental impacts of Environmental Science requires making sense of a complex system, that considers all the facilities, equipment, infrastructures, software, data, people and services that enable and support this type of research. Our multidisciplinary project team engages stakeholders as active research participants. Our aim is to design more sustainable DRI futures, identifying possible leverage points and ways to change current system dynamics that can potentially cause environmental harms. The complexity in the context of the project motivated us to include gigamapping in our mixed-method approach. However, implementing gigamapping has proved not to be as straightforward as we expected. What follows is an account of what we learned when we gigamapped (not least the shared language and differences in our terms across the team). We offer a description of our approach, linking it to the literature, and reflections on what did or did not work so far. We conclude by proposing the need for strategies and tools to better support participation from those without a design background for meaningfully and confidently engaging in gigamapping.
Keywords: Gigamap, Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI), Environmental Sustainability