SCC-CIVIC-PG Track B: Rehearsing Natural Disasters through Games and Simulations

Recent events requiring evacuations such as the Camp Fire in Paradise, California highlight the critical need to better prepare communities for life-threatening natural hazards (flooding, earthquakes and wildfires) that affect so many communities in California and the country as a whole. Resilience in the face of these dangerous events requires a variety of changes from personal behaviors to regional policies and infrastructure.

Despite the high stakes, change in this realm has proven slow and illusive. This proposal addresses this challenge by providing a means for emergency officials, incident commanders and community members to explore alternative responses to different hazards through the use of scenario-based games. These games, often referred to as “digital twins”, probe the interdependencies between the networks of transportation, lifeline infrastructures of water, power, and communications, and organizational plans that need to align for effective response to urgent hazards.

An interdisciplinary team of designers, civil engineers, policy experts, and community members will create social games based on wildfire, traffic and communication simulations.

The project's inter-disciplinary team will partner with organizations in Oakland and Bolinas, California who are seeking new ways to increase the ability of their communities to respond to wildfire evacuation events. Together, the team will co-develop the social games with the purpose of surfacing local insight, knowledge, and feedback. These games are far more than entertainment, rather, they are constructed as prototypes that are used to support a cycle of mutual learning between the community and the researchers.

In doing so, the team will create more resilient communities by using these instruments in a novel way to address the long-standing, classic problem of the transition of cognition to action. This project will offer new lines of research into more humanized data simulations, rapid, and iterative policy exploration and use of design at a systems scale.

The insights gained from this project will have applications for the many communities within California and the United States that need to develop ways to create more resilient communities prepared to take effective action quickly in response to recurring hazards.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.