The Goal

We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change-related citizen science web prototype (related to "UN Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts"). The prototype will be a mobile-friendly website that allows citizens to take and submit photos and other “ground truth” observations to the Trusted Authorities, during /after floods. This information can be used to help the authorities assess and predict the flood or disaster scope and impact.

We would like you to explore and document any recommendations and functionality/design modifications needed to extend our citizen science prototype, focused on floods, to help during a different type of disaster: Forest fires. We will provide screenshots and demos of our current flood prototype to help you understand and research any needed modifications. You should take into account the different needs of individuals or communities affected by forest fires, but while trying not to require us to change the existing prototype user interface, user experience, and customer journey too much. Create wireframes or mock-ups to represent the user interface changes that you think are needed to handle a forest fire disaster.

Your Contribution

You will be able to showcase an understanding of software design that will :

• Identify and recommend necessary feature/design changes to make our flood-focused prototype assist during or after a forest fire
• Create wireframes and mockups that show us how “citizen scientists” would use their mobile devices to (safely) conduct controlled in-situ observations during or after a forest fire disaster, that they can then upload and send to trusted authorities and data scientists.

At the start of the project, we will provide a walk-through of our existing flood-focused prototype site and content. We will also provide a wealth of background material on the application, its use case, goals, and objectives, and even detailed low-level fidelity wireframes as a starting point for you.

We will avail ourselves to meeting with students participating in this study once a week or as necessary to provide guidance and suggested research.