HASTAC 2023 Conference

On June 2021, residents living on the Eastside of Detroit faced severe flooding, damaging thousands of homes, and further exacerbating inequities for historically disenfranchised and majority-black and low-income neighborhoods on the Eastside. This frequent and increasing flooding is a social equity and aging infrastructure issue, exacerbated by climate change. Yet exisiting flooding preparedness protocol and policy is incredibly insolating, tedious, and inaccessible, putting the burden on individuals.

How might we design flooding preparation to be more collective, less overwhelming, and maybe even... fun? This community-based project is co-designed with ECAC, Eastside Climate Action Coalition, a resident-led climate coalition on the Eastside of Detroit. We co-created a series of design interventions to build power for collective action on flooding preparedness at multiple scales of community power: the neighborhood, organization, and city level. By surfacing resident generated ideas through embedding play, joy, and creative resilience, these design interventions aim to strengthen existing relationships and information sharing across Eastside Detroit's informal social network, and reorient the flooding preparedness process to be more collective, and less individualized.