Analytic and deictic approaches to the design of sustainability decision-support tools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper identifies two approaches to designing user experience in decision-support tools, each drawing from a particular model of political culture and operationalizing a different set of assumptions about typical users and potential use effects. While the analytic approach emphasizes the benefits of involving competent citizens in a 'rational' process of consensual decision making, the deictic approach highlights the benefits of finding resonance between everyday, lived experience and the premise and principles of policymaking. The paper demonstrates the two approaches by analyzing the visualization strategy chosen by the designers of MetroQuest, a Canadian sustainability decision-support tool commissioned by the City of Vancouver. The paper concludes by suggesting that the normative questions associated with the design of sustainability decision-support tools should be reconsidered in light of the relations between user experience and political culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".