The Resilience Extravaganza
The Resilience Extravaganza is a toolkit for educators to create a resilience carnival that informs and empowers students in the face of climate change. The carnival games support three core areas—education, voice, and advocacy.
2014 Design Ignites Change Student Innovation Award Finalist
Year
2013
Range of work
Content writing
Experience design
Game design
Human-centered design
Tools for learning
Collaborators
Diego Zaks
Jeannette Hodgkins
Jonathan Frey
20/20 Vision for Schools
Game & toolkit design. Preparedness Plinko engages students with questions on what to do before, during and after a storm. Wonder Ring gives students an opportunity to play ring toss and share what they know, think or wonder on a post-it wall, sparking thought and dialogue. Show of Hands is a customizable polling system and intra-school advocacy tool that develops out of students’ interests and concerns as they may surface from a sharing activity (like Wonder Ring).
The toolkit provides descriptions, background research and making/playing instructions for each of the activities. The games align with Bloom’s Taxonomy, which divides learning objectives into cognitive, affective, and psychomotor categories for a holistic form of learning, but they are structured such that they can be used individually if all three don’t align with the program or curriculum at hand. The toolkit includes time and budget constraints for consideration as well.
Diego Zaks, Jeannette Hodgkins, Jonathan Frey and I (“The Sandy Bros”) collaborated on all parts of this project, with me leading research, facilitation, the design of Wonder Ring, the evolution of Show of Hands and content writing.
Background & design inspiration. This project grew out of an assignment (in Pratt's Transformation Design graduate course) to design a community-led activity that could advance post-Hurricane Sandy resilience and preparedness efforts in South Brooklyn. Our research and interviews in the South Brooklyn community revealed that while many resources were available, people were uninformed about both storm preparedness and current recovery and resiliency efforts.
Inspired by Coney Island’s history and identity as America’s playground, we were interested in engaging the public in these issues of resiliency with a series of spectacles. The visual language of the Resilience Extravaganza thus borrows from Coney Island’s identity.
Design implementation. Scouting for locations and speaking with local organizations like Alliance for Coney Island and #ConeyRecovers led us into the realm of education. On November 2, we tested an initial iteration of our games at PS329 as part of the Resilience Mural Ribbon Cutting celebration. 20/20 Vision for Schools, an organization dedicated to mobilizing students and community stakeholders for sustainable change, helped us become a part of this event. It was an occasion for the community to learn, provide feedback and connect to neighbors while having fun.
Preparedness Plinko and Wonder Ring were prototyped and tested, as was Dam It?/Gate It? which prompted adults to vote on two major initiatives from the city’s A Stronger, More Resilient New York plan.
As the design implementation was a success and well-received by the community, we considered scalability and decided to create a toolkit for educators. We realized the educational and reflective games we created were useful beyond the impact of Hurricane Sandy and could be used in other communities impacted by climate change. We evolved the Dam It?/Gate It? mechanism into the more flexible Show of Hands for use within this context.
Dissemination & impact. We donated our initially created materials to NYC Partnership for Parks for use in City of Water Day. Additionally, we gained recognition for the project via the Design Ignites Change competition and at the UCDA Design Summit.
We would love to test and disseminate the toolkit to more schools and organizations in the future — please feel free to share this project with educators and reach out if you want to collaborate.
Let's get to know each other.
Send your hellos, questions and comments to hello@rachnathedesigner.com.