Limits at a Distance: Design Directions to Address Psychological Distance in Policy Decisions Affecting Planetary Boundaries

Abstract: Policy decisions relevant to the environment rely on tools like dashboards, risk models, and prediction models to provide information and data visualizations that enable decision-makers to make trade-offs. The conventional paradigm of data visualization practices for policy and decision-making is to convey data in a supposedly neutral, objective manner for rational decision-makers. Feminist critique advocates for nuanced and reflexive approaches that take into account situated decision-makers and their affective relationships to data. This paper sheds light on a key cognitive aspect that impacts how decision-makers interpret data. Because all outcomes from policies relevant to climate change occur at a distance, decision-makers experience so-called `psychological distance' to environmental decisions in terms of space, time, social identity, and hypotheticality. This profoundly impacts how they perceive and evaluate outcomes. Since policy decisions to achieve a safe planetary space are urgently needed for immediate transition and change, we need a design practice that takes into account how psychological distance affects cognition and decision-making. Our paper explores the role of alternative design approaches in developing visualizations used for climate policymaking. We conduct a literature review and synthesis which bridges psychological distance with speculative design and data visceralization by illustrating the value of affective design methods via examples from previous research. Through this work, we propose a novel premise for the communication and visualization of environmental data. Our paper lays out how future research on the impacts of alternative design approaches on psychological distance can make data used for policy decisions more tangible and visceral.