Prototyping Resilience
Serious games for wildfire preparedness · UC Davis Department of Design
Role: Undergraduate Research Assistant (Jun 2024 – Sep 2025) → Staff Research Associate (Feb 2026 – Sept 2026)
Project lead: Associate Professor Tom Maiorana
What I did: Community event facilitation · design initiative · visual communication · serious-game development
Tools: Adobe Creative Suite · Google Workspace
Using games to help communities rehearse evacuation
Prototyping Resilience is a UC Davis design research project built on a straightforward idea: a game can get a community to rehearse a wildfire evacuation before a real one ever forces the decision. Players work through the choices of an emergency while the stakes are still low. I spent about a year on the project across two roles, running game sessions with communities and doing the organizing and communication work that supported them. It worked well enough that the concept later grew into applied client work I went on to own with the Santa Barbara County FireSafe Council.
Why a game: serious games as low-fidelity prototypes
Wildfire preparedness is hard to make stick. The information is out there, but it's abstract, and the moment people most need an evacuation plan is the moment they can least think clearly. Created by Associate Professor Tom Maiorana as part of a multi-campus research effort, Prototyping Resilience tries something different: it treats serious games (games made for learning rather than entertainment) as low-fidelity prototypes of a real experience. Played at a table, a game can carry enough of the pressure and trade-offs of an evacuation to feel real while staying safe enough for people to experiment and even fail. Play through it once and you've already started planning.
Part of the work was figuring out which kind of game does that best, so the project built more than one format, from a town-specific board game to an active "evacuation cornhole" game.
My role across two phases
I joined as an Undergraduate Research Assistant in June 2024 and came back later as a Staff Research Associate. In the first role I did the hands-on work of developing and running the games in the field. In the second I focused more on developing the project further and communicating it to a wider audience.
Running the Tomales and Watsonville community events
The game only works when it's in front of real people, and facilitating a session takes some skill: keeping a heavy subject approachable while getting through the rules quickly, so people spend their time playing instead of listening to instructions. Just as important is what happens at the end, when the goal is to get people genuinely talking about what they would do. I helped run two community events. In Tomales, residents played the town-specific board game as themselves, moving across a map of their own community while local fire personnel controlled the fire. In Watsonville, the format was an "evacuation cornhole" game, a more physical way to get people thinking about the same evacuation decisions.
Reorganizing the files and pitching a Google Doodle
Outside the events, I looked for ways to make the project run more smoothly. I rebuilt the team's working files in Google Drive so everything was easier to find and use. I also led a Google Doodle proposal, which I took from the first concept to a finished pitch that we submitted.
Translating the research for a public audience
As a Staff Research Associate, I worked on public-facing materials that summarized and introduced the project, both the effort as a whole and its individual parts. The point was to take research-stage work and make it clear to a general audience.
From research to commissioned work: the FireSafe Council
The best sign that the idea had value is what happened next: it turned into paid work. The Santa Barbara County FireSafe Council hired me to adapt the concept into community-specific game materials for their wildfire-preparedness programming, which I handled directly as their designer. The university was where the idea got tested. The work for the FireSafe Council, which has its own case study, is where I turned it into finished materials.
What I took from the project
Working on Prototyping Resilience pushed me past the edges of studio design. Facilitating a room full of strangers and explaining research to people who don't speak design aren't things you practice at a desk. The project also made me more self-directed, since a lot of the useful work was work I had to find and do on my own. More than anything, it reminded me what I want my design to do: take something abstract or overwhelming and make it approachable enough that people actually engage with it. That holds for a wildfire evacuation as much as for anything I would build on a screen.