Human-Centered Design of Risk Communication for Flooded Home Remediation

After a flood, housing recovery is essential to overall household and community recovery. People need to get back into their homes to do cleaning and repairs. Flooded homes, though, pose secondary health risks from mold, bacteria, asbestos, lead, carbon monoxide, and other environmental and structural hazards. While there is technical guidance on safely remediating flooded homes, there is still an absence of risk communication resources for flood survivors that consider the social and environmental conditions in which they make repair decisions. A project team from the EPA used a human-centered design approach to produce how-to videos and a website to help homeowners, renters, and volunteers safely muck out and fix up flooded homes. This article presents a methodology for operationalizing the disaster and health behavioral social sciences into design choices for risk communication tools for flooded home remediation. It does so by bringing together threat appraisal, coping appraisal, and agency, or the capacity to act, into review criteria for video scripts and for the website format and content. The project team carried out discovery research to understand user needs through focus groups and interviews with flood survivors, volunteers, disaster social scientists, and EPA staff; problem definition by creating user personas and design principles and criteria; ideation to develop draft videos and website organization and content; and testing to get feedback and refine the prototype. The article discusses opportunities and limitations for using human-centered design that engineers and interdisciplinary teams can use in the development of risk communication to reduce pre- and postflooding risks and support housing recovery.