Namrata Bhattacharya-Mis presents Build Back Together: a human-centred design thinking approach to smart flood risk management

With the UK government’s 25 year Flood Hydrology Roadmap in mind and the need for involving society in creating innovative and smart risk management solutions, this project proposes to fill the gap in the evidence base in the field of the future of localised flood risk management. The generation of knowledge is focused on access to information, preparedness, and ownership of local communities over wicked problems such as flooding. Different actors in a community interact with their environment differently in times of emergency, therefore the project focuses on two groups of actors: the service providers (e.g., risk management authorities) and the service recipients.

Four national and one international workshop were organised with different stakeholders chosen from the broad stakeholder groups through a coordinated process of design thinking method which involved: understanding the problem, defining core problem statements, ideating (thinking out of the box on how to solve these issues), and creating smart and sustainable solutions using case study approach for best possible solutions. 

Dr Namrata Bhattacharya-Mis – Programme Leader, Natural Hazard Management (BA/BSc).
Namrata is interested in multidisciplinary research positioned at the intersection of physical geography, human geography and development studies. She uses both quantitative and qualitative (mixed) methods to understand the interaction between human-nature relationships with special reference to disaster resilience.