Job Description
Grade UE07: £40,247 to £47,874 per annum, pro rata.
School of Informatics / College of Science and Engineering
Part time: 12 hours per week
Fixed Term: For 6 months
The School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, invites applications for a research associate for the project UK Co-Benefits Atlas to help with user-centered design and co-design of an interactive and visual web data-platform to visualize and communicate data around socio-economic co-benefits of C02-emission reduction in the UK. The position is funded for the equivalent of 25% from now until end of July 2025 (Grade 7).
The Opportunity
The main task of the job is to coordinate and run the stakeholder engagement with future Atlas stakeholders partner institutions (see below) and to lead the co-design focus groups. The goal is to a) better understand the needs for communicating co-benefits data and b) to design respective visualisation and user interface designs for the atlas. The ideal candidate has experience in user-centered and co-design as well as visualization design, both through practice and an academic work. The job is embedded into an interdisciplinary team including a software engineer as well as researchers in visualization, HCI, and co-benefits.
The UK Co-Benefits Atlas project is a new project by researchers from Design Informatics/VisHub lab, the School of Informatics, the University of St. Andrews and the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute.
Current research from the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute (ECCI), using a model developed for the UK Climate Change Committee (CCC), finds that for every 1£ spent on climate change mitigation in the UK there are as much as 14£ of social benefits in the form of improved public health, better urban connectivity, and increased productivity. Here, we ask the question, How can we communicate these findings to inform and accelerate climate action?
To address this question, this project we will co-create an interactive web-based data interfacethe UK Co-Benefits Atlas (UKCBA). UKCBA will make co-benefits data and analyses more accessible, understandable, and useful for businesses, investors, researchers, third sector organisations and policymakers across Scotland and the wider UK. Compared to traditional static reports and research papers, visualization atlases are a novel and comprehensive means that provide interactive visualisations, in-depth analyses, and contextual explanations to explore data in a structured and accessible way; for examples, see https://vis-atlas.github.io].
The ECCI modelling team, which is part of our project core-team (Dr. Andrew Sudmant), provides 17 co-benefits for 1000 possible climate interventions in 57,000 UK datazones (lower-layer super output areas, LSOAs) across the UK. This project will enable us to co-create an interactive visualization atlas with its future users and stakeholders; for this project we already have strong commitment from 9 Scottish partners across academia, business, and the public sector (see below), stating the need of such an atlas and which are highly invested in supporting the project through attending workshops and helping with its co-design. The result will be a collaboratively created, cutting-edge, and first-of-its-kind platform capable of facilitating interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral collaborations and decision making between diverse stakeholders around the complex socio-economic benefits of climate interventions.
The project envisions facilitation and co-design of an interactive web-based data interface, the UK Co-benefits Atlas, to visualise emission reduction co-benefits on, e.g., health, energy bills and other measures, across the entire UK [1]. Inspired by our previous analysis of visualization atlases [2], this project will co-design and deploy a first version of the atlas, informed by extensive engagement with future atlas stakeholders such as the Scottish Research Alliance for Energy Homes and Livelihoods, PWC Sustainability, and Department of Energy Security and Net Zero. By the open data and analyses published through our atlas, we aim to inform decision making by businesses seeking commercial net zero opportunities, communities and policy makers with net zero mandates, researchers and analysts examining the socio-economic co-benefits of net zero interventions.
The successful candidate will be embedded within the VisHub research group (vishub.net, Benjamin Bach) at Informatics and EFI as well as the ECCI (Andrew Sudmant) and St. Andrews (Sean Field)
Tasks and responsibilities
[1] Sudmant, A., Boyle, D., Higgins‐Lavery, R., Gouldson, A., Boyle, A., Fulker, J., Brogan, J. (2024). Climate policy as social policy? A comprehensive assessment of the economic impact of climate action in the UK. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 1-15.
[2] Wang, J., Shu X., Bach B., Hinrichs U., (2024). Visualization Atlases: Explaining and Exploring Complex Topics through Data, Visualization, and Narration. Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07483
This post is advertised as part-time (7-10 hours per week), however, we are open to flexible working patterns. We are also open to considering requests for hybrid working (on a non-contractual basis) that combines a mix of remote and regular on-campus working.
Please include the following documents in your application
Your Skills And Attributes For Success
As a valued member of our team you can expect:
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