Designing Doable and Locally-adapted Action Cards for an Interactive Tabletop Game To Support Bottom-Up Flood Resilience

TL;DR

This paper presents a participatory design process for creating locally relevant action cards in an interactive tabletop game aimed at enhancing community flood resilience, emphasizing bottom-up empowerment.

Contribution

It introduces a novel iterative, community-engaged approach to develop actionable game content tailored to local flood resilience needs.

Findings

Identified 27 flood resilience actions from community input.

Developed 20 action cards for an interactive tabletop game.

Demonstrated potential of card games for flood resilience education.

Abstract

Serious games can support communities in becoming more flood resilient. However, the process of identifying and integrating locally relevant and doable actions into gameplay is complex and underresearched. We approached the challenge by collaborating with a community-led education center and applying an iterative and participatory design process of identifying and defining actions that may increase local applicability and relevance. The process comprised a field observation, two expert focus groups (n=4), and an online survey (n=13). Our findings identified 27 actions related to increasing or maintaining individuals' and communities' flood resilience, which we turned into 20 playing cards. These action cards are a part of a larger interactive tabletop game, which we are currently developing. Our work discusses the potential of card games to educate non-experts to increase flood resilience, and contributes to our process of identifying local needs and conditions, and turning them into engaging game artifacts for bottom-up empowerment.