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

2025-08-22

AI Summary

This study addresses the disconnection between local knowledge and public participation in flood resilience building. We propose a co-creative participatory design approach to develop “Action Cards”—a tangible, game-based intervention tool. Through iterative field observation, expert focus groups (n=4), and an online survey (n=13), we identified and localized 27 flood mitigation actions, distilled into 20 operational, ludic tabletop cards. Our key contribution lies in the first systematic translation of context-specific disaster risk reduction needs into playable, pedagogically grounded, and actionable game mechanics—enabling a paradigm shift from expert-led to community-driven resilience governance. As core components of a large-scale interactive board game, these cards effectively bridge local knowledge with disaster literacy education, significantly enhancing non-specialist stakeholders’ risk perception, collaborative intent, and capacity for adaptive action. The methodology offers a scalable, participatory toolset for inclusive resilience planning and implementation.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Cooperative Game Theory
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change, and Causality

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI

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.

Problem

• Designing locally-adapted action cards for flood resilience
• Integrating community-relevant actions into gameplay mechanics
• Transforming local needs into engaging educational game artifacts

Innovation

• Participatory design process for local adaptation
• Action cards derived from community identified resilience actions
• Interactive tabletop game for bottom-up flood resilience