Our Watershed Futures
Flip Labs is engaged in an ongoing project to help the small town of Ojai, California, address its water scarcity issue. The region is predicted to run out of drinking water within five years.
We designed and executed a series of co-design workshops to create ways of soliciting input to a community vision from residents who are unlikely to attend public meetings of any kind, even without a pandemic. The currently unengaged audience is the local Latinx community, elderly, working parents, undocumented residents, and youth.
The co-design teams created two games to solicit input on a future of “water resilience,” which comprised water issues, economic sustainability, fire resistance and social equity. The games will allow community residents to hold self-facilitated visioning sessions to imagine a more equitable future around water use.
Each game creates an
"aha" moment for players.
These games are designed to be an intervention to the system trap of "the Tragedy of the Commons" by creating a safe space to change mindsets around water use.
TLDR.
Project website:
Project Lead
Design Sprint Collaborators
Alexandria Rengifo
Justin Walker
McKinley Sherrod
Jiani Sapathy
Project Role:
Prototyping Lead
Design question
How might we co-evolve a community vision to galvanize sustainable collective action around water scarcity in the Ojai Valley, without everyone being in the same place to do it, or contributing at the same time?
Tools
Miro
Zoom
Process
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Primary Research interviews, relationship building, and recruitment of Community Co-designers
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Secondary research on serious games and futuring methods
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Conceptualize and design series of Co-design workshops for game development
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Build low fidelity prototypes during co-designer concepts for further building during workshops
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Build mid-level fidelity prototypes of 2 game concepts for hand-off to design firm.
Outcome
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Four game co-design workshop sessions + related miro boards and worksheets
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Two virtual game prototypes for mindset change around water use.
Game co-design workshops.
Planned and collaboratively executed four design workshops with 6 - 10 participants via zoom, using Miro as a working and presentation tool.
Game prototypes.
The co-design team developed 2 game concepts by the end of the workshop series.
Although as yet untitled, I refer to them below as the strategy game and the activity game.
The Strategy game
A four to six-player role-playing game where players take on characters with hidden and public goals. Water conditions change every year and players have to negotiate how to use water with one another.
Resources such as Community goodwill, Water conservation infrastructure, Community organizing skills and leadership roles are in play.
Nature/the environment is a non-player character that creates elements of chance and conflict for players.
The key game advancer is a traditional Chumash diving game called pə (walnut shell dice)
The Activity game
A game-like activity where participants are invited to real-life action and empathy-building in the Ojai community through elements like cards, stories, and physical murals and installations.
Participants draw activity and reflection cards from a community tree and a local map of Ojai. Participants contribute reflections and activity cards the tree upon completion of the activity.
Reflections + next steps.
Our design team was not able to access the community directly in person due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but were able to do Zoom interviews directly once the local project ambassadors had created safe outreach channels and established trust for the project with specific groups.
Our community liaisons connected us with interview participants, acted as sounding boards, alerted us to community context/issues – and became friends and colleagues along the way. Our community co-designers drove the project forward by modeling vulnerability and a willingness to jump into ambiguity.
The games are designed to create a system intervention to the system trap of "the Tragedy of the Commons" around water by creating an avenue of education and exhortation that changes mindsets around water use and water resilience. Each game was designed to create an "aha" moment. The game will be deployed in the Ojai community in the fall of 2020.