(soothing music)
Dino:Between the time when a disaster strikes,
and when a formal organization can drop can
can sometimes be a few days.
And in some instances a few weeks, FEMA approached us
for design consulting help to their cause.
Liesje:We've identified key ways that FEMA can work
with communities ahead of time
to really prepare for a response.
Dino:This was the first time that a government agency
such as FEMA approached a design agency such as
Frog to help tackle its problem.
Robert:We as a design firm found some very simple
tools like a printed playbook can have a
really long life within organizations.
Liesje:Part of the role in producing this book
was to talk about what it's like for FEMA
in a way that allows someone who's never
worked with a design firm to get a sense
of what we do and how we approach the problem.
(upbeat music)
Dino:Frog is a global product strategy and design firm.
We're solving strategic problems for businesses
and tactical design, that can mean the website
physical product, an actual service to an experience.
Robert:Companies tend to come to us
for a unique perspective.
what are the insights that we can bring
to them not just from their industry
But from a global understanding,
changes in consumer behavior,
changes in the way information is shared.
And the way goods and services move around the world.
Liesje:We bring a lot of different people
with different mindsets into one room.
And get them to start to think about
creative solutions to a problem.
Dino:At the end of the day it makes for better work
because everybody's opinion counts and everybody's
opinion can bring something new to the table.
(piano music)
Dino:We were invited into a round-table discussion
with FEMA's field innovation team to discuss
the events of Sandy which had happened 2 weeks prior.
The core of this entire initiative was flipping
the way we look at disaster relief.
When a disaster strikes, communities are the first
people to start addressing their needs by themselves.
So we looked at that and we said,
"These people are doing everything and anything
"that they can to get back up running, how can
"we give them the tools needed and empower
"them with something more formal?"
Prior to this program officially starting there were
a lot of Frogs essentially trying to get our communities
back up and running from a volunteering standpoint.
In a lot of ways Sandy affected our neighborhoods.
So we were all really jumping at the opportunity.
To address this could really make a difference.
Liesje:Two days after the storm, I went to Belle Harbor.
To St. Francis de Sales Parish where there was
an informal recovery effort underway.
This kind of messy hub where people just knew to go
there were people volunteering from outside the community.
People inside would just show up and kind of knew
that there would be food there, clothes there,
donations there or it was just a place to warm up.
The realization that that activity would go on
before any kind of formal aid came in was really important.
We're designing something, a concept [right]
for a disaster recovery center experience for FEMA.
But there's so much that they're not in control of
and so much that happens before they even
can touch the ground and so knowing that,
There's this kind of dissonance, there are these
community recovery centers and then there's more
FEMA formal centers and that they weren't the same.
And that it wasn't clearly being communicated
informed a number of ideas.
(upbeat music)
Dino:We pride ourselves on this holistic approach
and the interaction designers and anyone who's going
to be involved in the program, industrial designers,
visual designers, they're there from the beginning.
And they're there at the end.
When we approach a program we have to do our research.
We're really trying to understand the
mechanics of disaster relief.
At the end of that discovery phase what we do is
essentially put our findings on the table
with the field innovation team and start
to have those meaningful conversations.
That is essentially the core of what a FrogThink is.
Liesje:FrogThinks are fairly structured
for focusing conversations.
We make sure that everything has a very specific amount
of time and we run through a series of activities.
Liesje:Because one of the goals was to rethink
the way that FEMA is perceived on the ground.
In these situations, the brand mashup
worksheet came to mind immediately.
Like if you could give FEMA the opportunity to take on
qualities of another brand what would those be?
Like in this case, one group picked FedEx.
One example is 2-day delivery, you send
a package it's gonna arrive 2 days later.
How might FEMA adopt that 2-day turnover?
What does that mean for them?
The biggest change here is that you don't wait for a
disaster to hit, the goal is to make sure that
there are these predetermined locations
that everyone knows about so that informal relief
and that formal relief can meet in that same place.
Everyone on the team comes in and sits in on the workshop
and in this case, we used it with a bunch of FEMA's
partners both public and private sector.
It was really interesting to see how open FEMA was
to new ideas and how excited they were to be working
with a design firm and share whatever
documentation they could legally share with us.
They were happy to bring us into conversations
that were ongoing with other organizations
on a city level or a national level and their willingness
to give us insight into the problem was so useful.
Robert:Design is a very appealing thing right now.
To a lot of both industries and organizations.
But they really don't know what to expect out of design.
And so in this case you take people from
the federal government, from FEMA
you take people from the State government
and you're trying to bring them together
in an environment which they feel comfortable
as part of a creative process to shift
the dynamics for how FEMA works.
[airy electronic music]
We needed to be able to socialize these ideas
beyond the group that we were working with at FEMA
And so often creating some kind of artifact like a book
is a great way to make sure that an idea has legs.
Robert:A lot of what happens around design
has a great effect on the people in the room.
But it can be very ephemeral.
Some of the ideas that inspire them not just the
actual ideas but the ways of thinking
about them can fade out pretty fast
can be hard to explain to somebody else.
This sort of, chemistry that came together
in a session and so we're always looking
for vehicles that allow us to convey things
about not just the ideas but the process we went through.
Dino:If you look at the structure of the book
It's a high level approach as to how to facilitate
more tactical programs so that they're
within the community before that
community actually becomes survivors.
Robert:a playbook is largely about scenarios
it takes broad policy ideas and brings them down
to you know, a very human level experience
and storytelling that anyone can relate to.
Liesje:At every moment we're thinking about how
this individual is interacting with this larger system.
And so it's not you know, traditional
interaction design in that it's not thinking
through you know wireframes or wireflows.
But it is thinking about the flow that a person takes
within a broader story.
Dino:A lot of these folks are in the field
if there's a disaster, we couldn't always
depend on just being completely digital
because we couldn't depend on a tablet
or a phone to be present so the book had
to be something that they could stick into a purse
or even a back pocket.
With the design of the book we wanted it
to be an approachable document .
Because disasters are so widespread
and they affect anybody we remove the specificities
of those people, pulled a lot of the faces out of it
to say that this essentially is for everyone
Also, adding faces would push it way
too far into the cartoon level.
It's all very intentional, finding that balance
between something that is approachable and minimal,
and something that can be taken seriously.
Alicia:Throughout the book we went
for a lot flat colors, lot of flat shapes
and then we added like a little dimension with,
it's like a papery texture that we used as
an overlay for a lot of the illustrations.
For the characters, we played around with
different shades to show different ethnicities.
And we had these characters already set and the we just
redressed them to fit whatever setting they were in.
There were little iconic treatments that
we used throughout the book.
In this instance with the little cross,
[raised] a map to show where the DRC is located nationally
We also used it to describe where they
actually would set up centers at certain institutions.
Or you know schools, in this instance,
they would have a DRC at a Starbucks
I laid out this timeline as it is now.
We talked it through, me and the team and we're like,
"Okay what would we ideally want it to look like?"
so that we can show that FEMA actually takes action
earlier on in the process to prepare them
for something before it happens.
So we put a huge arrow in there showing
where they should be, it was really simple
it didn't have to be anything crazy
and it still follows the illustration style
that we were going for pretty clearly.
Liesje:In the wake of a disaster,
things are chaotic and people needed clarity
to begin to put their lives back together.
So the more clarity that we could bring
to the disaster recover experience
the better a job we would do.
[serious music]
Dino:At the end of this program we were
asked to present this at the White House.
I think it's a huge achievement for Frog.
That motivated approach to get our city
back up and running and to see that the
work that we're doing reached pretty much
the pinnacle of what we're trying to get to.
(music becomes upbeat]
Dino:The response to the book was overwhelming
not just from the press but also from FEMA
In the sense that they're implementing a lot of these ideas.
Robert:It gave them permission to reframe
how they engaged communities,
the way in which they used resources, I think,
there was a sense coming out of Sandy
that there were real questions about the right way
to do that and that opened up the opportunity for design
to potentially reframe and offer different pathways.
A design process can both be inspiring
and provocative but practical and concrete.
For FEMA I think, as they were bringing stakeholders
around to sort of look at how to reflect
on what had happened in Hurricane Sandy
They now had something that they could say,
"You know this is an idea that can really take us forward,
"and help us evolve and learn from this experience."
(music ends)