Unit 1: Assess Impacts

In the Exploration phase of the EDGE process, you would have identified desired personal, social, economic and environmental impacts. You now need to consider how successful the project has been in achieving these.

Types of assessment

There are two ways that impacts can be assessed

• feedback

• reasoned speculation

Feedback

Some impacts are immediate and you can ask users if they experienced the impact. For example: do you feel the application improved your health and well-being? The feedback can be gather as part of the beta testing.

You can justify this type of impacts assessment by summarising the feedback you obtained from beta testing.

Reasoned Speculation

Some impacts are beyond you capacity to assess (eg. reduction in the impacts of climate change). For these types of impacts, you will need to express a justified opinion on its impact

To justify the opinion you need to identify a mechanism to achieve the impact, or provide an example of a similar process. For example, health and well-being was improved through the increase in the users physical activity.

Recording the assessments

Irrespective of the type of assessment, you will need to rate the success of the application achieving each impact. This is best done in a table.