Digital Bastards for a Climate Resilient Delta

Digital twins are digital representations of complex human-environment-technology interactions for decision support (e.g.,Vossepoel et al., 2021). These digital twins can be used for both long-term scenario evaluation and short-term nowcasting. This supports decision-makers in assessing strategic short and long-term measures in relation, for example, to natural hazards and technological risks prevention. As such, they are a means for scientists, policymakers, and industry to engage with society and extract the best value from existing data and models to understand and interact with the system Earth. Globally, several ongoing projects are targeted towards the use of these digital twins to secure the resilience of delta regions under conditions of a changing climate.

This workshop brought together the designer perspective and the more comprehensive ‘user-perspective’. In doing so, this workshop contributed to transitioning the design of digital twins from the re-creation of human-environment-technology interactions to the co-creation of applicable decision-support tools. Such latter tools are known as digital bastards.