Visualizing design thinking for volcanic risk communication

The mutual understanding between communities, stakeholders, and experts is central to successfully communicating volcanic risk. However, this process does not always involve the voice of people at risk or considering fundamental aspects of their lives (e.g., a social, cultural, and political background). Moreover, considering equality, diversity, and inclusion is key for building trustful and democratic dialogues. In this respect, design thinking is a peoplecentered technique that has been used for decades in research focused on solving societal problems. According to the literature, the three approaches used in design thinking are focused on addressing it as a cognitive style, a general theory of design, and a resource for organizations. Based on a more critical perspective, a practice approach consists of understanding design as a relational process in which stakeholders are codesigners and designers are other kinds of stakeholders. Other perspectives visualize design thinking as an awareness that seeks to “move away” from some set of circumstances in the present thought to be undesirable, for instance, the current disaster risk facing a community. Recent revisions point to linking designers, endusers, and stakeholders, incorporating creative and analytic approaches to provide more intuitive design outcomes able to meet the real needs of people. Despite design thinking being used to guide both disasterrisk reduction and longterm rebuilding after a disaster, disaster management and communication widely lacks such type of design knowledge. To test the viability of using design thinking as a tool for volcanic risk communication, we updated the technique to three essential steps: 1) Understanding and learning about the local context, by identifying people’s needs and priorities; 2) The design and test phase which includes ideating a communication strategy and its improvement through community feedback, and; 3) communicating risk and hazard knowledge as a complement to the local knowledge, with a sensitive application according to people’s realities and vulnerabilities.