(light music)
Liesje: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 be able to
make sure that an idea has legs.
Voiceover:A lot of what happens around design has
a great effect on the people in the room
how it can be very ephemeral.
Some of the ideas that inspired 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.
The 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.
Voiceover: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 even become survivors.
Voiceover:Our 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.
So it's not traditional interaction design
in that it's not thinking through wire frames
or wire flows, but it is thinking about the flow
that a person takes within a broader story.
Voiceover:A lot of these folks are in the field
if there is a disaster and we couldn't
always depend on this 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
can 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 wide spread and
they effect anybody, we removed the specificity
of those people and pulled a lot of the
faces out of it to say that this essentially is for everyone.
Also, adding faces would push it way to 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:Through out the book we went
for a lot of flat colors a lot of flat shapes
and then we added a little dimension with,
it was like a paper texture 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 then
we just re-dressed them to fit
whatever setting they were in.
There were, little iconic treatments that
we used through out the book.
In this instance with the little cross,
we're using that to show where
the DRC's are located nationally.
We also used it to describe where they actually
would set up centers at certain institutions
or schools in this instance they would
have a DRC at like a Starbucks.
I laid out this timeline as a 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 need clarity to begin to put their
lives back together and so the more
clarity that we could bring to the disaster
recovery experience the better a job we would do.
Voiceover: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 were doing reached
pretty much the pinnacle of where we
were trying to get to.
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 re-frame how
they engage communities, the way in which they use 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 re-frame and offer different pathways.
A design process can both be in 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, this
is an idea that could really take us forward
and help us evolve and learn from this experience.