Wildfire Resilience: The Boardgame

Project Overview: As the frequency and scale of wildfires grows it is critical that communities in fire prone areas are able to develop and implement effective evacuation procedures. Yet, despite the high degree of danger associated with wildfire evacuations, there are very few chances to explore these types of procedures in a way that are low-risk, iterative, and leverage local knowledge. Very little progress has been made on the way we might “prototype” evacuation events. This project draws on an expanded notion of prototyping and demonstrates the ways a board game has been used to develop greater understanding of wildfire evacuation procedures. The game supports cross-disciplinary collaboration, insights from the community, and elevated an understanding of a highly complex scenario. The findings suggest a rich potential for the ways games can be used to quickly explore other complex systems with minimal risk in dramatically reduced timeframes.

Our work has been covered nationally by NPR. Link to the coverage ›