Our work in the Katrina-Rita Context and the co-development of ZooMICSS, the Zoomable Map Image Collection Sensemaking System, have grown through the interaction of a unique combination of people and things: hurricanes; evacuees housed in university stadiums; scholars interacting with them and talking to one another across disciplines; a desire to help people help themselves; and consternation that better resources were not being marshaled to help displaced people find friends, neighbors, loved ones, and jobs as well as to organize their communities to have a voice in what happens to their former homes. This prototype was birthed through collaboration between sociologists concerned about the long-range aftermath of relocation for evacuees of hurricanes Katrina and Rita and computer scientists interested in designing humanitarian applications for GPS and locative media.
In the big picture, ZooMICSS is part of a larger project designed to iteratively incorporate input from the evacuee community into subsequent development. We intend to accomplish this through coupling what is termed Participant Action Research from the social sciences with Iterative Design from the field of human computer interaction. While initially the research and design work would focus around hurricane evacuees currently located in Texas, the resulting interactive social process and digital technology would be applicable to any disaster scenario involving evacuation. ZooMICSS is a locative media project, that is, one based on connecting digital media (in this case, photos) with Global Positioning System (GPS) location identifiers.
The project starts with the establishment of a Cultural Center where evacuees can get together and rebuild identity and community in a non-institutional setting that celebrates and validates their cultural heritage. The recognition and rebuilding phase of hurricane recovery must be developed through the input of evacuees. This input will take place through Participant Action Research (PAR), a social process which consists of community members and scholars working together to define what kind of research questions should be pursued and how they should be carried out. One anticipated concern is, "what kind of local knowledge that facilitates daily life is lost when people are relocated?" Community members are trained in skills to help carry out the research so they are active participants throughout the process; this contributes to their development of new human centered and technological job skills. Similarly, community input is sought regarding what access to information the technology should provide and how it can work to be easy to understand and use. Together PAR and the iterative design process will continually revisit participant input as the processes of research and technology development proceed so that the outcome genuinely fits the needs of the community. We anticipate that such needs will include locative photo documentation of pre-hurricane homes and current residences; personal stories of evacuation and resettlement; job seeking and job offering; and photo documentation of current and changing conditions of neighborhoods and support infrastructures including homes, schools, churches, grocery stores, and gas stations. The PAR and iterative design processes must be combined in order to develop technologies that actually meet human needs, especially in critical situations such as disaster recovery.