Mapping Wicked Problems — Water Quality

Team: Olivia Shoucair, Monique Smith, Ling Jiang, Lauren Miller

For this semester’s Transition Design class we’re exploring a number of the wicked problems facing the city of Pittsburgh. Our team was assigned the issue of poor water quality.

There are many facets of this issue which are tied to consequences like unsafe lead levels and fracking pollutants in the water supply. Shortly after we started this assignment, a boil water advisory was issued for most of Pittsburgh due to a possible giardia contamination, making our exploration of the topic even more pertinent.

We began our brainstorming session by discussing the problem as a group, exploring how water quality issues have impacted other students and have shaped our own concerns about the drinking water in Pittsburgh. All of us were skeptical of drinking from the tap and a couple of us were in the process of getting our water tested for lead.

We began to dig deeper into the issue by researching the topic as a group. We shared articles that we discovered and discussed our findings. Once we were relatively comfortable with the domain, we began writing our insights onto post-its. We used the five category framework that was provided to us and clustered our post-its based on whether they were root causes or consequences.

Next, we started to link specific root causes to their consequences by drawing lines between related post-its. Originally we only had one level of root causes, but eventually added a subcategory of secondary root causes. This process helped us group our causes into buckets, which revealed the larger flaws of the system. For example, ineffective water treatment, unreliable citizen test kits and lack of sufficient and regular water testing all stem from poor management practices by the PWSA.

Initially, we struggled with identifying which post-its were root causes and which were consequences. In some cases we found that consequences were actually root causes for other problems. We addressed this tension by creating connectors between different areas of the map. For example, a citizen’s lack of awareness could be a consequence of unreliable citizen test kits, but it’s also a root cause which could lead to impacts on public health.

This led to our final map:

Our team didn’t have time to finalize our stakeholder map, but we questioned whether we should have started our process by creating one. We wondered if it would have been a helpful framework for mapping out the issue, by ensuring that our map reflected the perspectives of all stakeholder groups.

Overall, we felt that this process was beneficial in helping us arrive at a holistic understanding of the water quality issue in Pittsburgh. The exercise forced us to explore the problem from a variety of different frames, helping us uncover dynamics that we may not have otherwise noticed. It also illustrated the interconnectedness of the underlying root causes and consequences, demonstrated by the fact may of our elements could exist under multiple of the 5 categories.

As we were working on our map, however, we became concerned with the usability of our final product. We understood the process by which the map came together and its tangled web of relationships, but would other people take the time to read and understand it? For these reasons, our group discussed the usefulness of the map as a communication device. Viewed alone, the map would be hard to decipher without someone to guide you. Given this, we thought the map would be most useful as an inward facing design tool to help designers understand a problem or as an exercise in a co-design process with real stakeholders to help drive a common understanding of a problem

Connections with other maps:

1. It was quite interesting to see water quality, specifically in terms of lead levels, appear in the education wicked map. While we did discover in our research that lead consumed by children can lead to behavior and developmental problems, it was only one consequence among many in our map. The educational wicked map was able to give it more attention in a specified context. Currently, lack of comprehensive testing and awareness of the populace make it difficult to empirically evaluate the health effects of lead consumption on Pittsburgh’s youth. It may very well be that it is causing significant learning and behavioral problems that negatively affect the educational experience of many children. The Allegheny County Health Department is currently discussing making lead testing in infants and toddlers mandatory, which should not only help prevent negative effects on children, but also provide important data as to the severity of the problem.
2. In our wicked map, under the social section, we mentioned that the exposure to lead in the water may be largely one of unequal exposure, with poorer areas more severely affected. The residents of these areas may not have the voice or resources to address their pipeline problem. While not specifically mentioned in the gentrification map, it would interesting to see how the gentrification of areas in Pittsburgh affects the water quality crisis going forward. Will the problem be more hastily addressed in those areas getting an influx of businesses and new residents?

Similarly, it would be interesting to explore the juxtaposition of poor water quality and crime in Pittsburgh. There is already a known correlation between crime and economic status, as well as a suspected correlation between poorer areas and lead consumption. A study examining the relationship between crime and lead levels — whether causal or correlative — would be illuminating. This would require more rigorous studies of the issue in the Pittsburgh area.