Research

We sought to understand disasters through expert interviews and secondary research

Overview

Global disaster management is a massive domain with myriad problems. We decided to focus on natural disasters, rather than man-made, as these disasters have been increasingly present in the news, and affect thousands of lives around the world every year.

Research Plan

Our exploratory research went through several phases of collecting large amounts of data to analyze in order to narrow to a design problem to solve.

Secondary Research

In order to understand the major components to disaster resilience and response, we began our research with literature reviews of disaster management areas and a competitive analysis of what other power management companies similar to Eaton are doing in the disaster management space.

Key Insights:

Disaster Planning

Disaster planning saves money in the long-term, but isn’t often invested in because governments are bound to relatively short-term election and budget cycles. The National Institute of Building Sciences claims that “$1 spent on disaster resilience saves between $4-6 in disaster relief."

Communication

Communication is hardest hit during a disaster -- even with resilience plans in place, information flow is impacted by unreliability, difficulty in source identification, and inconsistent data.

Climate Change

Climate change affects both governments and private entities around the world. Governments in particular have been slow to respond to changing weather patterns.

Technological Innovations

Technological innovations such as drones, crowdsourcing apps, predictive analytics, and microgrids are becoming more prevalent in disaster relief efforts.

Renewable Energy

Many regions are making the switch from oil and gas to renewable energy, and diversified sources of power make communities more resilient.

Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration

Multi-stakeholder collaboration is imperative to both planning and relief efforts, and is most effective when started at a grassroots level.

Interviews

Once we felt we had a firm grasp on the general problem areas within disaster management through secondary research, we reached out to people to conduct expert interviews. We spoke with industry experts from the American Red Cross, World Bank, disaster relief nonprofits, universities, and think-tank organizations.


We interviewed several experts remotely, and then sought out eyewitnesses, aid workers, and Eaton employees in Puerto Rico.

Affinity Diagrams

The interviews produced hundreds of individual notes, which we analyzed using an affinity diagram. Although each conversation was different, we began to see broad themes within disaster management that showed common difficulties in developing more resilient communities, and enabling disaster response and relief.

Our affinity diagram revealed many common themes:

Microgrids and Renewable Sources of Energy

People acknowledged that they had to shift to renewable energy for a more sustainable future, but were concerned about cost and maintenance.

Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration

Pre-disaster resilience planning and post-disaster relief both require collaboration of multiple actors, including government, private companies, nonprofits, and community members. While in practice local and federal governments should lead disaster efforts, they often lack the resources to do so, and sometimes have limited control over foreign aid organizations.

Communication and Technology

When main lines of communication are down post-disaster, new issues emerge that must be solved with alternative technologies.

Disaster Preparation

People often do not take disaster preparation seriously until it is too late, as it is costly and requires high effort. Often it is not politically feasible for governments to spend considerable money preparing for an event that may never occur.

Issues Related to Climate Change

Climate change is impacting normal storm patterns, making them more frequent and less predictable. Even though rising sea levels is now common knowledge, more and more people are still moving to the coasts. The combination of densely populated areas with unpredictable climate increases community vulnerability in many areas.

Data Collection

When we asked experts why disasters are not predicted fast enough, they stated that there just isn’t enough data to do so accurately. Climate change and lack of long-term data prior to the 20th century make predictive analytics for natural disasters more difficult.