Ekos: The Path to Resilience
Thursday, February 9
United States: 10am PDT, 11am MDT, 12pm CDT, 1pm EDT
Europe: 18:00 GMT/WET
Christopher Kennedy
Ekos: The Path to Resilience is a multiplayer board game that challenges a group of six community members to come together and envision a more equitable and sustainable City of Ekos in the face of climate change and other challenges. During the game of Ekos, players alternate between building social, ecological and technological systems (SETS) and responding to a range of events from flash flooding and extreme heat, to the expansion of mass transit or nature-based solutions. Working cooperatively as one of 6 players — a City Council Speaker, Community Organizer, City Planner, Ecologist, Designer, and Modeler — your goal is to 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. Ekos was developed with the goal of creating a playful platform for individuals and communities to discuss and learn about issues of urban resilience, climate governance, and community-based codesign.
During this event, you will hear from one of the game’s developers Christopher Kennedy who is the Associate Director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School. Learn more about how Ekos was conceived, how the game addresses critical sustainability issues, and our plans to create a digital mobile friendly version of the game. We’ll explore questions that inspired our design process such as: “What does it mean for a city to be resilient but not equitable?” or “How do we design a game about complexity that is actually simple and fun to play?!”
To learn more visit: https://urbansystemslab.com/ekos
Presenter
Christopher Kennedy is the associate director at the Urban Systems Lab at The New School and lecturer in the Parsons School of Design. As an artist and scholar, Kennedy’s research explores the social-ecological benefits of urban plant communities, multispecies thinking, and community-based approaches to environmental stewardship and environmental art. Kennedy holds a BS in environmental engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an MA in Environmental Education from NYU, and a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina.
Members and one guest are free. General Public can attend for $10. All participants MUST REGISTER.
