Jess L McPeak

Serious games for wildfire preparedness at the UC Davis department of design

Prototyping Resilience is a UC Davis design research project built on the idea that games can get communities to rehearse wildfire evacuation together. I spent over a year on the project facilitating community game events, taking initiative behind the scenes, and helping communicate the project to the public. The concept proved compelling enough that it later evolved into applied client work.

Games as low-fidelity prototypes

Wildfire preparedness information exists, but it's often abstract, and the moment people most need an evacuation plan is the moment they're least able to think clearly.

Prototyping Resilience, created by Professor Tom Maiorana, uses games as low-fidelity prototypes for wildfire emergencies. A game can recreate enough of the pressure and trade-offs of an emergency to make the stakes feel real, while staying safe enough that people can be curious, experiment, and even fail.

Part of the work was exploring which kind of game does that best: from a town-specific board game to an active, physical "evacuation cornhole" game.

Facilitating, organizing, & communicating

I joined the project as an Undergraduate Research Assistant in June 2024 and later returned as a Staff Research Associate: doing the hands-on work of running the games in the field and collecting data, then going back to help develop and communicate the project more broadly.

I helped facilitate two community events:

• Tomales: the town-specific board game, where residents played on a map of their community and worked through an evacuation while local fire personnel drove the fire's behavior.
• Watsonville: an "evacuation cornhole" event, a more active, physical take on getting people to evaluate their own preparedness.

Behind the scenes I looked for places I could add clarity and momentum:

• Reorganized the project's working files in Google Drive, rebuilding the structure so the project materials were easier to find.
• Led a Google Doodle proposal from concept through to a finished, submitted pitch.

As a Staff Research Associate, I worked on public-facing materials to summarize and introduce the project, translating academese into something a general audience could engage with.

From research to commissioned work

The clearest measure of the idea's value is that it grew into real, commissioned work. The Santa Barbara County FireSafe Council brought me on to make community-specific game materials for their wildfire-preparedness programming, work I owned directly a a contract designer. This research is where the idea was explored; the FireSafe Council is where I took it and made it concrete.

What I took from the project

Working on Prototyping Resilience pushed me beyond studio design. Facilitating a room full of strangers, translating research for everyday people, and being self-directed enough to find the useful work and just do it.

The project reaffirmed the throughline in everything I make: taking something abstract or overwhelming and make it approachable enough that people actually engage with it.