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Abstract
Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) opens new opportunities for environmental communication and crowd sourced planning for future climate related problems. Foundational practices of ethical environmental planning and design are representing landscapes and including the public in the process of decision making. AR can place visual and auditory information onto real places, asking a wider audience for input more than traditional planning tools. It is important that the planning and design community research emerging tools like AR to ensure they are used inclusively and result in both the planners and public making more educated decisions about our environmental future. Using a crowd storytelling approach that connects both the history of the landscape and imagined future, this research gauges the environmental attitudes of residents of Darien, Georgia, a rural coastal town that has a history of hurricanes, flooding, and landscape changes, before and after using a custom mobile AR application, youARhere, to determine if those attitudes were impacted by the digital intervention. Environmental attitudes have been strictly defined in the environmental psychology community to quantitatively score perceptions of the human/nature relationship as either utilitarian (human dominant) or preservationist (nature dominant). This research finds that these deeply held environmental worldviews are not changed after using the app, but that a concern for the future of climate related problems is expressed through stories that were prompted because of the app content. Furthermore, confidence drops in perceptions of a positive future for coastal life revealed through an attitude of uncertainty about beliefs long held about climate skepticism and a belief that science and engineering could solve any future environmental woes. The stories derived from this intervention as well as those registered in the app can be considered a new type of qualitative data that assists in environmental planning. They offer a glimpse into the collective thinking of threatened populations while involving the public in the process by collecting and sharing their experiences and insights in an effort to make more educated decisions. Lastly, this research benefits the field of environmental psychology by suggesting the concept of environmental attitudes include perceptions of an unknown climate future.