Summary form only given. A short summary of the panel is provided. Flooding is the most frequent and costly disaster threatening the sustainability of cities in Canada and also around the globe. Technical approaches alone are not effective in addressing the problem because flooding issues require discussions and agreements among stakeholders. This workshop will begin with a “5×5” speaker session: five presenters speak for five minutes each offering a different viewpoint on the topic “Water in our Cities”; together, they cover the following perspectives: public, private, global, academic, and artistic. Attendees will then participate in the online Flood Resilience Challenge, an interactive “serious game.” Serious gaming is an approach to learning about complex socio-environmental problems that creates safe spaces for stakeholders to interact and explore innovative ideas for addressing these problems and imagine unknown futures. The game involves role-playing, which offers an effective means of gaining insight into different perspectives, developing communication and conflict resolution skills, and facilitating collective decision-making.

Barring unexpected developments, the next half century appears likely to experience a widespread transformation in the ways in which societies around the globe produce and consume energy. Enormous attention is being paid to a range of dimensions of this potential energy transition, from technological innovation to its implications for greenhouse gas emissions, energy costs, and dependence on technologies with catastrophic potential (as demonstrated by the BP oil spill and the Fukushima nuclear crisis). Yet, the broader implications of this transformation for individuals and communities have received less attention. Will the distribution of benefits and risks of new energy systems be similar or different in the future? Who will gain? Who will lose? How will ideas such as energy rights, energy justice, and energy security impact energy transitions? More subtly, how will social values, behaviors, relationships, and institutions change alongside changes in energy technologies? This panel will explore these topics in a conversation with a number of experts in energy science and policy.

Building information modeling is only beginning to incorporate human factors, although buildings are sites where humans and technologies interact with globally significant consequences. Some buildings fail to perform as their designers intended, in part because users do not or cannot properly operate the building, and some occupants behave differently than designers expect. Innovative buildings, e.g., green buildings, are particularly susceptible to usability problems. This paper presents a framework for prospectively measuring the usability of designs before buildings are constructed, while there is still time to improve the design. The framework, which was implemented as an agent-based computer simulation model, tests how well buildings are likely to perform, given realistic occupants. An illustrative model for lighting design shows that this modeling approach has practical efficacy, demonstrating that, to the extent that users exhibit heterogeneous behaviors and preferences, designs that allow greater local control and ease of operation perform better.

There are several widely recognized tests for determining whether government should intervene in the marketplace. Does the public policy improve efficiency, equity, or stability, or does it pursue widely accepted social objectives? This paper examines the formulation of public policies toward new energy carriers such as hydrogen, in terms of what they ought to be and what they are in actuality. It goes on to examine policy implementation issues, which will be strongly affected by the hydrogen economy's likely development trajectory. Hydrogen, as currently conceived, can be expected to evolve from a local market to a continental market over time, implying that state and local policies will strongly influence its development. The paper closes with strategic policy recommendations

Energy is a strategic resource that has justified as well as influenced the outcomes of wars, fueled as well as strangled economic progress, polluted as well as cleaned up the environment. This paper sheds empirical light on the ideological battleground over energy security policy. Using international data, the paper demonstrates how countries have made distinctive choices affecting the importance of energy as a determinant of economic growth. This paper puts the current debate over oil imports in historical context, considers the relative merits of supply-side and demand-side solutions, and proposes a policy synthesis.

This paper briefly recounts the experience of the New Jersey Comparative Risk Project in order to illustrate the role played by insights from the science and technology studies literature in the project's design. It shows that a project's adequacy and legitimacy can be enhanced by treating the potential contributions of experts, officials, stakeholders, and the public respectfully, and by building in much interaction among these groups. It also reveals a costly tradeoff between heightened interactions and participant fatigue.

The paper shares preliminary findings of a survey of participants in studies by the recently disbanded U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. The focus of the survey is on efficacy of the review-intensive study process used at that agency. The findings confirm the value of this process, but with important caveats, and suggest useful strategies for performing "communicative" analysis.

Analytical tools are hard to learn and use. Yet getting the numbers right is only part of the job for engineers, economists and other quantitative modelers. Bosses, clients, colleagues and members of the public need to understand-and believe-the analytical results, or else the job is not done. Practicing analysts work in a social, communicative context which few academics understand and about which few students learn. This paper introduces the concept of communicative analysis, establishes behavioral norms and suggests a set of heuristics for its performance.