Oct. 22: Andrea Figueroa

Visualizing Washington’s Transportation Future: How Human-Centered Research Shaped MobilityWA2050

By 2050, the Central Puget Sound Region is projected to grow by 1.5 million people, bringing the population to approximately 5.8 million. Supporting this growth will require major infrastructure decisions: improvements to the I-5 corridor, the introduction of ultra-high-speed rail, and the addition of a third commercial airport. These choices carry long-term consequences for mobility, equity, and environmental impact across the region. The MobilityWA2050 platform was developed through the Mobility Innovation Center at the University of Washington to help the public and policymakers explore these future transportation challenges. The platform uses interactive, scenario-based visualizations to enable deeper public understanding and informed planning.

Development began in Fall 2024 with two parallel efforts: collecting, cleaning, and exploring data from multiple transportation agencies, and holding a series of meetings with domain experts and collaborators to identify key planning challenges, system constraints, and user information needs. Subsequent phases included data integration and initial visualization design, with frequent feedback loops throughout. The process ended with usability testing involving members of the general public and transportation experts. This testing guided further refinements and helped us understand how people made sense of future transportation challenges through the platform. In this talk, I share how this human-centered process shaped MobilityWA2050 and where it stands today.

About the presenter

Andrea Figueroa is a postdoctoral researcher and data scientist at the Mobility Innovation Center at the University of Washington, working in partnership with WSDOT. She holds a degree in Computer Science Engineering from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (UTFSM) in Chile and a PhD in Human Centered Design and Engineering from the University of Washington. Her work centers on data visualization and human-centered data science, with a focus on making public data accessible.

 

 

Part of HCDE’s 2026–2027 annual theme, Public, exploring human-centered design and engineering in public life. Learn about the annual theme →