Ekos: The Path to Resilience is a multi-player game that challenges a group of 6 community members - a City Council Speaker, City Planner, Community Organizer, Ecologist, Designer, and Modeler -- to come together and envision a more equitable and sustainable Ekos in the face of climate change and other challenges. Build a network of resilient systems, use resources wisely, and collaborate with the other community members to improve the adaptive capacity of your systems against extreme events.

Designing Ekos

The challenge was to translate complex ideas like Sustainability, Resilience, and Equity into achievable tasks while running the risk of oversimplification. Questions that drove the design process were sometimes specific and tangible; What are the game resources and how do you get them? And other times they required a more conceptual discussion; What does it mean for a city to be Resilient but not Equitable? or Can one person win without everyone else winning? 

After many hours of testing and a dozen iterations, the final product is a nuanced game that provides lessons ranging from specific climate-related concepts, to general life lessons, such as how to work with people who may have different goals and objectives than your own. It has been a great experience to play the different versions of Ekos throughout the design process, and to navigate across its emerging (unintentionally designed) dynamics.

“The challenge was to translate complex ideas like Sustainability, Resilience, and Equity into achievable tasks.”

— Ryann Abunuwara

Learn more about how Ekos was developed by watching the video above!

Ekos Team

Ryann Abunuwara

Claudia Tomateo

Chris Kennedy

Timon McPhearson

Acknowledgments

Ekos: The Path to Resilience was developed by the Urban Systems Lab, an interdisciplinary research, design and practice space founded by Timon McPhearson that provides insight into developing more equitable, resilient, and sustainable cities. The goal of Ekos is to create a playful platform to discuss and learn about issues of urban resilience, climate governance and community-based codesign. Through game play and conversation, Ekos provides a unique forum for individuals and communities to better understand the complexity of city planning and decision making in a time of climate crisis. The event cards featured in the game draw from real-world occurrences and extreme events experienced by frontline communities and urban dwellers around the world. Similarly, the adaptations and social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) conceptual framework used to address these events and challenges are increasingly approaches used by decision makers in cities globally. We hope that Ekos will offer a starting point for continued conversation and discussion on how urban resilience can be used as a lens to inform the future of cities, especially in ways that benefit those most at risk.

Game concept developed by Ryann Abunuwara, Claudia Tomateo and Chris Kennedy. Graphic design by Claudia Tomateo. Content for the game informed by the Urban Resilience to Extreme-related Weather Events Sustainability Research Network (URExSRN) and the Converging Social, Ecological, and Technological Infrastructure Systems (SETS) for Urban Resilience project with support provided by the National Science Foundation (Grants No. 1934933 and 1444755).