Prototyping Wildfire Resilience

Community resilience in the face of dangerous events like wildfires requires a variety of changes from personal behaviors to regional policies and infrastructure. Despite the high stakes, development in this realm has proven slow and illusive. This project addresses that challenge by utilizing the practice of prototyping (commonly used in product and service design) as a way to quickly explore alternative responses to events that threaten the lives and fabric of a community with minimal risk. 

I developed experiences that examined 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. Our interdisciplinary team of designers, civil engineers, policy experts, and community members utilize these experiences as a way bring potential issues to the foreground so that we can increase the ability of their communities to respond to wildfire evacuation events.

This project is has been funded by a 2019 Seed Fund Award from CITRIS and the Banatao Institute at the University of California and a Stage 1 Award from the National Science Foundation’s CIVIC Program.