Sustainability Impact Assessment Tools (SIAT) for Regionalised European Impact Analysis: Focusing on the design process

The SENSOR project aims at delivering ex-ante Sustainability Impact Assessment Tools (SIAT) to support decision making on policies related to multifunctional land use in European regions. Decision support tools are required that provide scientifically substantiated anticipations of the effects of future policy options on sustainability issues. SENSOR responds to these information needs at European land use policy level with the SIAT, which is interactively designed with end users (Helming et al. 2008). This paper illustrates the design process of the SIAT under the concurrent condition of a high usability for end users. To meet this goal, end user involvements by using techniques of software prototyping is applied.