Summary
In Chicago, extreme heat isn’t just uncomfortable—it can be deadly. As climate change intensifies, the city’s most vulnerable residents face increasing risks from dangerous heat waves.
To put policymakers in the shoes of Chicago residents facing extreme heat events, ID graduate students in Associate Professor Ruth Schmidt‘s Behavioral Design Workshop developed scenarios in partnership with sustainability nonprofit Elevate and policy analyst Katelyn Stenger from the National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL).
Strengthening Emergency Plans
As policymakers confront situations that commonly arise from extreme heat, they must navigate real-world conditions, tradeoffs, and outcomes that vulnerable populations encounter during extreme heat waves. What policymakers may not realize is that attempts to prevent heat-related deaths often fail to connect with the vulnerable populations they aim to protect. These vulnerable populations include people in under-resourced neighborhoods, people with chronic conditions, and workers exposed to dangerously hot working conditions.
SITUATION
PROCESS
Reframing Risk Through Play
Three interactive scenario-based experiences developed by a team at ID used a combination of systems design, design strategy, and behavioral design to help policymakers recognize and address these critical gaps.
Elements of one scenario address heat and chronic illness through a board, scenarios, characters, actions, and reflection prompts.
SOLUTIONS
Impact Through Interaction
Three Scenarios
The team crafted scenarios that challenge common assumptions about risk perception and protective behaviors. The scenarios move beyond statistical models to explore how real Chicagoans make decisions under challenging circumstances. They also expose how necessary tradeoffs or behavioral influences may not be fully recognized, even by well-conceived action plans.
The project team conducted extensive secondary research to identify core barriers and identify the populations most at risk during heat emergencies. This research informed three detailed scenarios that highlight unintended consequences of various policy approaches.
Scenario 1: Chronic Conditions
During extreme heat events, people with chronic conditions face complex daily realities rarely understood by those creating emergency policies. Breaking Point, a tabletop scenario, immerses policymakers in these challenges and emphasizes the fact that over 80 percent of heat-related deaths occur in individuals with pre-existing health conditions.
Players assume various roles—including healthcare providers, community organizers, and government officials—and navigate scenarios across Chicago neighborhoods with different resource levels. Through collaborative decisionmaking, players discover how existing plans often overlook behavioral aspects and unique needs of those with conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and respiratory illnesses. The game reveals gaps between expected behaviors (like medication adherence) and real-world constraints while encouraging participants to develop more inclusive emergency planning strategies.
Scenario 2: Occupational Hazards
This scenario focuses on occupational hazards and social pressures faced by workers during extreme heat. The simulation highlights alarming statistics: 100 percent of fatal and 73 percent of non-fatal heat-related workplace incidents exceeded recommended heat stress limits, suggesting current worker guidelines are inadequate.
The game explores three distinct worker populations—frontline emergency workers, blue collar workers such as laborers and trades people, and gig workers—each with different levels of autonomy, institutional support, and risk exposure.
Players navigate tensions between economic growth and sustainability, individual comfort and collective resilience, and rapid implementation versus community engagement. This exercise can help policymakers understand the financial pressures, power dynamics, and trade-offs workers face when making heat-safety decisions.
Scenario 3: Neighborhood Vulnerability
The third scenario, Play It Cool, examines how neighborhood characteristics influence heat vulnerability. The play board simulates three adjacent Chicago South Side communities with varying risk levels: Hyde Park (low risk), Woodlawn (medium risk), and Washington Park (high risk).
Players adopt roles as formal authorities (clinicians, researchers, government officials) or informal community leaders (organizers, business owners, religious leaders), each with different response speeds and authority levels. Through scenario cards representing real-world situations, players make resource allocation decisions and witness how these choices interact with unique neighborhood characteristics. The scenario reveals how social capital, trust networks, and embedded community assets are crucial yet often overlooked factors in effective heat emergency responses.
IMPACT
Protecting Vulnerable Residents
The initial scenarios have been fully developed and are currently being tested and refined, with the aim to materially influence how Chicago policymakers approach extreme heat planning. By making the human impact of policy decisions more tangible, this project can drive more effective and equitable approaches to protecting vulnerable residents during dangerous heat events.
TEAM
Students
Amina Awad (MDes + MPA 2024)
Benedicta Gokah (MDes + MBA 2024)
Robert King (MDes 2025)
Flora Massah (MDes 2024)
Natthaporn Naktnasukanjn (MDes 2024)
Akshay Pagar (MDes 2025)
Kulwadee (June) Pruksananonda (MDes + MBA 2025)
Ahmed Shaikh (MDes 2025)
Daniela Velez (MDes + MPA 2025)
Faculty & Partners
Ruth Schmidt (ID Associate Professor of Behavioral Design)
Katelyn Stenger (Researcher, National Renewable Energy Labs)
Paige Neri (Senior Strategist, Elevate)
Rachel Scheu (Principal Director, Elevate)
Stephanie Morse (Director of Research & Innovation, Elevate)