Problem context

With over 150 rainy days a year, water flows through Seattle’s stormwater system nearly 40% of the year. The rain travels through urban landscape, picking up various pollutants that run directly into waterways. This pollution impacts the local ecosystem, adversely altering the livelihood of marine and plant life, which has downstream effects on people that inhabit Seattle as well.

Currently, stormwater runoff pollution efforts in Seattle primarily focus on the infrastructure level led by city government. However, there is limited understanding and connection of how individuals can impact what enters the stormwater system. Moreover, there is limited public conversation and awareness about this pressing environmental issue.

Design challenge

How might we help Seattle residents understand what contributes to pollution in stormwater runoff, and equip them with resources to implement healthy stormwater runoff practices in their neighborhoods?

With a broad contextual landscape in mind, we try to tackle the challenge from an individual and a neighborhood community perspective. Our target users are Seattleites, including homeowners and renters, people who are new to Seattle or have lived here for their entire life.

Research methods and findings

To gain a breadth of people’s knowledge about stormwater runoff pollution and their perceptions about taking actions to address the issue, we conducted survey(43 responses), interview(5 participants) and secondary research as major research methods.

Summary of research findings

Stormwater runoff pollution doesn’t resonate as a problem for many people.

People don’t know they should be aware of stormwater runoff pollution as the effect is not explicit and obvious. It’s hard for people to identify rain as a vehicle for delivering pollution to bodies of water. Stormwater runoff, a part of climate change, is viewed as something too big to take on at an individual level.

Based on the survey responses, only 63% of people who recognize stormwater runoff pollution as an important environmental issue in Seattle think their actions have an impact. Interestingly, renters felt less agency than house owners due to less control over the property where they resided. Functional and direct benefits motivate people to take more stormwater runoff actions.

As discussed by Gao et al. [1], residents were generally supportive of stormwater management practices (SMPs) in public spaces. However, residents were more motivated to adopt SMPs if benefits were perceived as functional, more so than if they were environmental. Similar pattern was discovered in our interviews. If people are more directly related to the impact of actions, they are willing to take more of them. People don’t know where to start to help support healthy stormwater runoff.

Few people know how to support healthy stormwater practices. Most of the time people are told what not to do (e.g., don’t wash your car in your driveway), instead of what they should do. Current outreach of stormwater runoff population is not effective.

Related information is sparse and esoteric, which makes it hard for people to consume, especially novices. The city of Seattle approaching the public through traditional channels (e.g., mailing information booklets, a physical information desk for questions) doesn’t fit with a transient Seattle population, many of which are newcomers.

Personas

We identified 3 personas according to their effort to take action, community engagement and information acquisition. These categories compile a full picture of who is engaged in taking action and what taking action looks like to them.