where there’s smoke…

This project is a cooperative game designed by a team of architects and planners in a Planning for Housing Post-Disaster course at MIT. Our team’s goal was to first understand the factors that impact rural housing security before, during, and after a wildfire in and around the Wildland-Urban Interface, and then to turn this knowledge into a board game to facilitate conversations in rural communities.

My primary contribution, in addition to background research, was the graphic design of the cards, of which there were four types: Fire Event, Wrench, Post Fire, and Player cards. The concept was to keep the designs simple and straightforward in the way they related to the board. The cards used the same visual language as the tiles to help players understand where they were applicable. Most importantly, however, was the tone of the cards. As you can see from the samples above, it was key to incorporate a sense of humor and levity into the game. While preparing for post disaster realities is a serious and non-trivial occasion, I wanted the game itself to feel accessible and create rapport among those playing-- even if that was to scoff at what we’d written on the cards.