Vermont Resilience Planning Tool

Helping state agencies and municipalities understand climate risk, prioritize mitigation, and make uncertainty visible.

Civic techClimate resilienceMaps + data visualizationUX research + systems designDecision support

ROLE

Senior UX Designer / Researcher

USERS

State planners · Municipal officials · Agency partners

CONSTRAINTS

High uncertainty · Public accountability · Complex geospatial data

Note: Some screens are simplified/anonymized to protect sensitive data.

Statewide map showing vulnerability overlays and resilience scores — A statewide view of Vermont’s vulnerability data, combining environmental risk layers into a single decision-support interface.

OVERVIEW

What this was

The Vermont Resilience Planning Tool was designed to help the Vermont Agency of Transportation and partner agencies understand climate vulnerability across the state.

It brought together flooding, erosion, infrastructure risk, and mitigation layers and turned them into a shared planning surface for prioritizing action under uncertainty.

This wasn’t a forecasting tool. It was a sensemaking tool.

THE PROBLEM

Where people got stuck

Fragmented data spread across maps, reports, and agencies
High uncertainty with real-world consequences
Difficulty explaining why one area should be prioritized over another
Static outputs that didn’t support exploration or discussion

The problem wasn’t lack of data. It was lack of clarity, comparability, and confidence.

Early concept maps and exploratory overlays — Early exploration of how multiple risk layers could be visualized together without overwhelming planners or obscuring tradeoffs.

Raw data views and legacy map outputs — Existing tools surfaced raw data but offered little support for interpretation, comparison, or decision-making.

APPROACH

How I worked

I collaborated with researchers, engineers, and subject-matter experts to translate climate data into a usable planning experience.

The work focused on understanding how planners reason about risk, designing for comparison (not false precision), and making uncertainty explicit rather than hiding it.

Interviews with planners and agency stakeholders
Iterative prototyping of map interactions and overlays
Testing how people interpreted scores, ranges, and uncertainty indicators

THE SOLUTION

What changed

The tool evolved into an interactive system that supported exploration and discussion rather than prescribing answers.

Layered map views that could be toggled intentionally
Clear hierarchy between base geography and risk signals
Aggregate vulnerability scores paired with transparent breakdowns
Interactions that encouraged asking “why,” not just “what”

The goal wasn’t certainty. The goal was shared understanding.

Interactive vulnerability scoring panel — A composite vulnerability score paired with transparent sub-scores, helping planners understand what was driving risk in a given area.

Map controls for toggling resilience and risk layers — Layer controls helped planners explore scenarios, compare regions, and surface tradeoffs during discussions.

IMPACT

What improved

Faster alignment across agencies on risk priorities
Clearer conversations about mitigation tradeoffs
More confidence explaining decisions to stakeholders
Less reliance on static reports and screenshots

The work shifted conversations from “What does the data say?” to “What should we do next?”.

LEARNINGS

What I learned

Designing for climate resilience isn’t about perfect answers. It’s about supporting reasoning under uncertainty, making complexity navigable without oversimplifying, and treating ambiguity as a first-class constraint.

This work shaped how I think about trust, clarity, and decision support in data-dense systems.

Expand scenario modeling and time-based comparisons
Improve storytelling outputs for public communication
Refine how uncertainty is visualized and explained
Explore how the patterns could scale across agencies/states