Vancouver Survivor
A team-based card game and microsite for the City of Vancouver. It aims to empower newcomer youth to become aware and prepared for potential earthquakes.
Team
Polina Chzhan, Cassey Peng
Timeline
February 2020, resumed September 2020 (2 months)
Initial Problem
The design brief was provided by the City of Vancouver’s Community Resilience team, as they were looking to change how they deliver and target the distribution of existing emergency preparedness materials on their website.
“How do we make emergency preparedness and risk reduction more accessible to those unaware?”
Community Resilience within Emergency Management
To unpack emergency management, the City of Vancouver is focused on strengthening community resilience by ensuring that each member of the community is more aware of emergency preparedness pre-disaster and can leverage their skills to help others when a disaster strikes.
“Community Resilience is about ensuring that there are no gaps, that our lowest common denominator is raised up and we don’t suffer from weaknesses that are exposed under great stress.”
Targeting Newcomer Youth
Based on a 2014 Emergency Preparedness survey conducted in Canada, we can see that there are various vulnerable groups of individuals including immigrants and visible minorities when it comes to an earthquake due to the lack of preparedness compared to their domestic-born counterparts. We also decided to narrow down the scope to newcomer youth as we noticed a 51% increase in the amount of international students coming to British Columbia.
Our Driving Insights and Design Opportunity
From conducting 10 interviews with newcomer youth from a variety of cultural backgrounds inclusive of China, India, Vietnam and Italy, we uncovered three main insights that drove the direction of our design solution. Newcomer youth are not engaging with the existing emergency preparedness materials on the City of Vancouver’s website because of their pre-existing assumptions, reliance on others and the current distribution channel is ineffective. The solution needs to be mindset-challenging, empowering and targeted.
Design Values
Simplicity is Key
As newcomer youth may struggle with language barriers, we need to consider the use of straightforward language where possible so they are motivated to approach and absorb the materials.
Transcend across Cultures
With Vancouver being a multicultural city, messages need to be understood from a variety of cultural perspectives which is achieved through the use of universal icons and illustrations so diverse newcomer youth can engage with the game’s message while connecting it to their lives in Vancouver.
Delight Not Scold
Rather than using a purely educational tone from existing earthquake preparedness materials, we aim to capture the essence of a game by connecting with newcomer youth through joyful, optimistic language to make them want to engage with the preparedness resources and then motivate them to want to get prepared.
Relatability to Real Life
We need to ensure that newcomer youth are not stuck within the immersion of a game and are able to apply the relevant earthquake preparedness knowledge into their everyday lives.
Solution: Vancouver Survivor
Learning through play has shown to be effective in long-term behaviour change and a game can use visuals and simple language to help newcomer youth communicate with more ease, overcoming cultural and language barriers. Our proposal is a Vancouver edition of an earthquake preparedness card game and microsite. The objective of the card game is to collect resources as a team to overcome hazards and the microsite sets up newcomer youth to be prepared.
PART 1: Team-Based Card Game to Build Awareness
Entry Point: As newcomer youth tend to stay within their social circles, we recommend the City of Vancouver to partner up with the Vancouver School Board and MOSAIC’s Engaged Immigrant Youth Programs as an initial entry point to introduce the card game during their social events.
Learning Through Play
Resource cards need to be collected to overcome hazards in the game, stimulating awareness about the resources you will need for different potential situations that could arise from an earthquake.
The resource content was retrieved from the PreparedBC’s website, representing actual items that are needed for an emergency. To ensure newcomer youth could identify with the resources, universal icons were used. The copy was tailored to be easy to understand and to add little moments of delight in order to reduce the purely informational aspect of the existing materials.
Mind-shifting from Unaware to Aware
We aim to challenge the perception for newcomer youth that Vancouver is not prone to earthquakes through Vancouver-based hazard cards that were inspired by local testimonials from BC’s past with earthquakes. We decided to focus on earthquake events specifically due to Vancouver being located with an active earthquake region. Local landmarks were depicted as stories within the cards to bridge a personal cultural connection to the risk.
To add an additional layer of immersion and application to reality, we propose to embed a NFC tag within the card that plays a local hazard video when a phone is placed on top of it. The rationale behind this decision is to unfold a thought-provoking narrative to shift the players’ minds about the serious events that could arise from an earthquake.
Empowering on Personal Responsibility
Newcomer youth are empowered through the game by taking on a role in their team, representing that they play an important role to help others in their wider community during an earthquake.
Diverse avatar illustrations were used for newcomer youth to bridge a more personal connection with their role. The copywriting was focused on encouraging the player to realize that everyone has transferrable skills that they can leverage during an earthquake.
Bridging the Physical and Digital Experiences
With many existing multiplayer trading card games utilizing the camera function to scan cards to load them into a digital application, we thought that we could use a similar camera interaction by having the player scan the QR code within their role card for a more intuitive transition to the microsite.
PART 2: Questionnaire to Reflect on Real Life Preparedness
We recommend to integrate the questionnaire within a gamified microsite that is strategically placed within the existing touchpoint of the City of Vancouver’s website.
Entry Point: To encourage active participation throughout the card game activity, we decided we could use the downtime when a player gets eliminated from the game to set them up to be prepared.
Self-Reflection about Personal Preparedness
As we needed newcomer youth to be able to apply the knowledge from the game to set them up to be prepared in real life, we used a questionnaire so they can critically evaluate their in-game knowledge and household preparedness behaviours. Throughout the copy, we focused on small additions of earthquake content that are applicable to reality so the players can connect with them in their everyday lives. We leveraged the existing cards from the game in order to ensure a cohesive experience and to invoke familiarity.
As the player might get brought back into the game at any point, we ensured that the questionnaire was short and easy to pause. We also wanted to reveal the data behind the preparedness levels of all the other players of Vancouver Survivor in order for newcomer youth to not feel like they are alone.
Celebration of Personal Preparedness +
Maintaining Encouragement
At the end of the questionnaire, we wanted to celebrate when newcomer youth received their preparedness scores based on their knowledge and actual preparedness at home. Regardless of a high or low score, we maintained an uplifting tone to ensure that newcomer youth still felt encouraged and compelled to become prepared.
Impact: Sparking the Conversation about Preparedness
From the research conducted with newcomer youth where we uncovered that they tend to stay within their social circles, this inspired our direction to take action by having newcomer youth take the initiative to empower their close friends and their households in order to begin the first conversation about getting prepared for an earthquake.
Inspiring their Social Network
We saw an opportunity to prompt newcomer youth to share their preparedness scores on social media through a premade Instagram story that includes a hyperlink to the questionnaire in the caption. The rationale behind this is that this creates an individual commitment for self-preparedness and acts as a call-to-action for others in their immediate social circles to get prepared.
Igniting a Conversation with their Caregivers at Home
Based on the newcomer youths’ responses to the questionnaire, we wanted to speak directly to the newcomer by providing them with a personalized earthquake kit list tailored to their own individual home needs rather than a general list. To set them up to take the next steps towards preparedness, the kit list includes real prices and links them to locally-partnered retailers that sell the earthquake preparedness items.
This serves as a conversation starter when they go home to encourage them to talk to their families, relatives and/or homestay families about earthquake preparedness in order to set them up for preparedness in their everyday lives.
Result: Playtesting
By conducting two separate playtesting sessions with newcomer youth, our team was able to iterate on the game’s mechanics, progression, and aesthetics of the cards to improve the learnability of the game for novice players. First, we used rough paper prototypes and then more refined cards with visuals to continue tweaking the game. Without losing the design objective in mind, we needed some way to ensure newcomer youth were not only aware but could act on that awareness to be prepared for an earthquake. We also received feedback from our testers that the game made them aware, but not prepared in real life which led to the inspiration for a microsite that extended the experience from the physical card game to the City of Vancouver’s website so newcomer youth are prompted to evaluate their personal preparedness in their everyday lives.
Value Proposition
Vancouver Survivor provides the City of Vancouver a proactive prevention and mitigation strategy by driving educational awareness and preparedness to a vulnerable newcomer group while helping newcomer youth feel a sense of belonging in a new environment through a team-based card game. By arming them with the knowledge of local hazards as well as the importance of personal responsibility and earthquake kit resources, we hope that this could transfer to their ability to take the initiative to help others during an earthquake, resulting in a more resilient Vancouver.