Every year, people, businesses, and communities are caught off guard by flooding, in part because they do not understand their flood risk. Over the years, considerable effort has made to develop better flood maps, for example by adding information such as inundation depths, or color-coding the riskiest areas. But what if a map is not the best way to communicate flood risk?

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is taking an innovative approach to generate fresh ideas for visualizating flood risk. The approach involves 1 or 2 hackathons to generate visualizations and a substantial public engagement effort to determine which visualizations are the best understood. A hackathon is a design event in which computer programmers, software developers (including graphic designers), and subject-matter experts collaborate for one to several days to produce software or simulations on the spot. The visualizations are planned to be posted for public feedback and analyzed to determine which visualizations best communicate flood risk. Although a final report is planned to be produced, the primary objective is to achieve practical results that demonstrably improve public understanding of flood risk.