What are the issues with natural resources? How can emerging interactive technology help?

Dissemination of local natural resource issues is an ongoing priority for Natural Resource Management (NRM) and Environmental Agencies. However, with an ever-increasing amount of information competing for our attention and time, getting messages across to people is increasingly difficult. We naturally believe ourselves to be experts at skimming emails and websites, but our natural human predispositions mean that we often misinterpret information, or simply skip significant aspects (Weinreich et al, 2008). Our research investigates the use of interaction technologies with tangible objects for promoting a better understanding of natural resource issues within spatial contexts. The first of three stages involves interviews conducted with local natural resource experts, from NRM, conservation, forestry, government, and industry, which aim to identify current natural resource issues and understand their associated key messages, as-well as perceptions on how well these messages are presently understood and perceptions of their impact. The results of this stage will provide a clear understanding of the boundaries of the desired learning goals, as well as extract the key elements required to understand the often complex and unexpected interactions within real-world natural resource contexts, rather than classroom scenarios. These components will be used in the second stage of the research, which aims to associate these learning requirements to physical objects that control a large format, multi-touch, spatial-based simulation learning system. Objects such as models of buildings, trees, and animals allow users to physically play with information in order to view the effects of the real world natural resource interactions. It is anticipated that an understanding of natural resource issues will be achieved via interaction and manipulation of physical objects that represent and control the cause parameters of natural resource issues (Antle et al, 2011). This paper focuses on reporting the results of the interviews and findings on the initial design considerations for a survey on natural resource issues.