AHAH! Heat Scenario Event

Abductive Heuristics Alternate Reality Role-playing Simulation : Heat Scenario

7 March 2025

Enhanced Immersion Studio | Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center | Mesa AZ

Team

Sha Xin Wei: (Synthesis | Complex Adaptive Systems | Arts, Media & Engineering) ARS Design

Sarah Bassett (Resilient Visions CoLab | Practice in the School of Public Affairs, Emergency Management & Homeland Security): Scenario Design

Nicholas Pilarski (Media and Immersive eXperience Center | Resilient Visions CoLab | Film School | Arts, Media & Engineering): ARS Design

Andrew Robinson (Synthesis): Interactive media programming

Yannie Szeto (Resilient Visions CoLab): Graphic arts and production

Travis Kupp (Complex Adaptive Systems): Research, participant-observation

Overview

AHAH! was a decision-making role-playing simulation where people from the Phoenix area practiced navigating unpredicted and unintended consequences in scenarios of extreme heat challenge.  AHAH! created a space for players to navigate surprise events, examine power asymmetries, and play out imaginative strategies in plausible scenarios before we have to live them. 

Introduction to Scenario for Role-players

We invite you from the city’s infrastructure and public sectors to play various institutional as well as personal social roles, under fictive conditions. The premise is that it’s early spring, 2025. Imagine that you live in a community – which could be anywhere in the world – of about 250,000 people. The local government has assembled you as a task force of officials, utility representatives, neighborhood leaders, and business owners to best organize the city before the heat season that’s about to hit the city.

Various stakeholders have incommensurate priorities; no one can take overall priority.

As summer approaches, decisions made this spring about the human, fixed, or mobile capital will determine how well the community weathers the challenges ahead. Who takes responsibility for which preparations, and how these various groups coordinate, will be crucial to community resilience in the face of unanticipated or unprecedented conditions.

 

Related Work

This in-person alternate reality role-playing simulation builds on the Navigating Uncertainty proof-of-concept developed with and commissioned by the United Nations Development Program.

See also Prototyping Social Forms and Alter-Eco: Alternate Economies & Ecologies.