The study took the form of an online experimental decision scenario deployed through the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure Envision professionals' email listserv. This amounted to a total population of 5,872 individuals. For completion of the experiment, participants received one credit hour towards the Envision certification continuing education requirement. After consenting, participants were randomly assigned to either the future or the present framed experimental groups. The manipulation took the form of the project vision statement within the RFP for the District of Sparwood’s Water System Integrated Master Plan in British Columbia, Canada.
Upon the completion of data collection, statistical analysis was performed on the collected responses. The analysis looked for significant differences in design metrics: design life, return on investment, useful life to the community, and the Envision credits. For the design metric, individual t-tests were performed between the present and future visioning groups. The individual Envision credit scores were analyzed using a multi-level model due to the ten individual credits' repeated measures. The Envision scores were also examined to see if they would predict any of the design metrics.
Background information. When introducing the project to the participants, the background was given in the District's vision. Participants were instructed that the District of Sparwood is looking to provide and manage infrastructure and services—including potable water, sewage, storm water, and roads—cost-effectively and sustainably. The RFP explained to participants how the Water System Integrated Master Plan fit with the broader District vision. As such, the Master Plan focuses on the District's need for water distribution, wastewater treatment and collection, and storm water conveyance systems.
The participants were told that creation of Water System Master Plan served "to provide strategic direction, support asset management initiatives, and assist the District in short- and long-term decision making". This includes financial, operational, and strategic considerations for how and when decisions should be made according to the plan. Participants were assigned the role of lead engineer for the District of Sparwood. Accordingly, the participant oversees the creation of the Water System Master Plan. Additionally, as the lead engineer, their decision-making responsibility was to do what was best for the District by ensuring the project benefits outweigh its costs.
Comprehension checks. At this point, the participants were primed on the Envision framework requirements and the wastewater master plan project. The primes were broken up into multiple components to ensure prime strength and comprehension checks were used to ensure participants' understanding. For example, each participant was presented with a comprehension checks, form of a multiple-choice questions, after the project master plan details and the Envision written response instructions. By ensuring the manipulation was primed in the participants as intended, we would have confidence the results were pertinent to the questions we are looking to ask.
A total of 679 participants opened the decision scenario and consented to the experiment. Only a small portion of these participants completed the decision scenario. If the participants failed any of the comprehension checks or did not answer the three design characteristic questions, they were excluded from the study. Accordingly, we excluded 418 participants from the study analysis for a total sample size of 261 and the completion rate was 38%. As the study population were working professionals, the long completion time, of around 45-minutes, likely resulted in a large number of the dropouts.
Experimental Manipulation. At this point, the participants received a manipulation in the form of the RFP project description. As mentioned above, the participants read information detailing Sparwood as it is now or what Sparwood envisions for the future. The descriptions only varied in temporal framing across the two experimental groups.
Below, the manipulation is listed in full. The future statement appears in brackets, and the present statement appears in parentheses. The manipulation is designed influence the individual's perception of the temporal proximity of the design task. Therefore, we primed participants with a project description framed in terms of the present or the distant future. Research has shown it is possible to elicit temporal perceptions of the near-term future that are imperceivable from the present21. However, as the timepoint becomes into the distant future, or over ten years, it less likely for individuals perceive the event as they would the present22,23. As such, by framing the future condition in distant future, participants were more likely to perceive the design task as significantly different from the present.
"[In 2035,] Sparwood [will be] (is) a caring, neighborly, and sustainable community with pride in its natural environment. A world-class multi-purpose network of trails, parks, and recreational areas [will] support an active, healthy, and highly livable community. A unique and vibrant downtown [will be] (is) the social, cultural, and economic heart of Sparwood. Opportunities to live, work, learn, shop, and play [will be] (are) in close proximity. A diverse economy [will provide] (provides) a range of jobs and services to supplement the mining industry, which [will be] (is) the economic lifeblood. A variety of housing options [will allow] (allows) residents of all income levels and lifestyles to live comfortably in Sparwood [throughout all stages of their lives]."
The participant answered the three main DV questions after the manipulation. All three DV questions related to different aspects – design life, ROI, and useful life to the community – of the wastewater treatment plant's design lifespan allowed for assessing the participant's goals around project sustainability.
Envision framework. After completing the questions on the primary dependent variables, the participants moved on to the experiment section, which dealt with the Envision framework and the secondary dependent variables. Here, the participants provided their targets for ten Envision credits, which pertained to the wastewater facility's sustainable achievement. Participants had to select the level of sustainable achievement for each credit and write a prompt explaining how they would do so. The prompt increased in length if participants set their achievement at higher-levels to simulate the real-world mental effort required for a more sustainable project6. The decision scenario finished with necessary demographic information along with questions on the participant's work history.
As mentioned above, Envision is a sustainable design framework facilitated by the Institute of Sustainable Infrastructure. The framework comprises 60 credits across five different areas: quality of life, leadership, resource allocation, the natural world, climate and resilience, and sustainable design. The achievement levels, for each credit, can range from improved (the lowest level), enhance, superior, conserving, and restorative (the highest level). Depending on a project's achievement for each of these individual applicable credits, and their achievement levels, the Institute of Sustainable Infrastructure will grant an overall project sustainablility score. These sustainability certifications include: verified (the lowest level), silver, gold, and platinum (the highest).
After answering the questions to the main dependent variables, they provided their sustainability targets, for the project, via a series of Envision credits. The participants did so by responding to ten credits, presented in random order, from the existing Envision framework. The credits drew from a few different Envision categories, namely: quality of life, leadership, resource allocation, and climate and resilience – see figure 1 for more information. After selecting a sustainability target the participant described, via a written statement, how they would accomplish this sustainability level, without technical specifications. The length of the response increased with each higher sustainability target in order to simulated the cognitive burden of greater achievement.