Welcome to the Home-Made Disaster Kit. This kit is a card game designed to help people have conversations about their concerns, anticipated needs, and best use of available resources in planning for environmental disasters.

This game was presented by Emilio Vellis at the Texas Barnraising in the spring of 2019, and Public Lab collaborated with Emilio and members of Reaccion to produce this kit as a deck of cards that could be included in disaster kit and used as a tool to help communities strategize and prepare for their responses to environmental disasters.

This card game will be available for pre-order in the Public Lab store in December, and we anticipate further expansion kits that delve further into strategies for environmental sensing and monitoring.

This game is meant to work with communities at the beginning on the concept of using tools together to make a solution. Playing it takes about 10-15 minutes.

People are divided in groups of 10 max.

The game begins with describing a scenario (e.g. "You're working/sleeping at day/night at home and you hear a banging sound afar. You check the news/check outside and you hear that a gas explosion/earthquake/flooding is happening. Your family is at with you/away/nearby. You check with neighbors and see that someone is trapped/a home is on fire. What would you do?).

People should work together to choose from the tools to form their emergency kit out of household items. There is no limit to how many tools are used.

After working for five minutes, a person from each team explains what the tools will be used for.

After two or three scenarios, discussion is brought on how to use tools and the importance of creating an emergency kit.