Desi Matel-Anderson - Global Disaster Innovation Group LLC

Hello everybody! Well, I have a quick

story before I get started on my

presentation. This is a really happy

community. Do you know what they're doing

back there? They danced. As I came up onto

stage they were dancing, trying to

send good vibes my way onto the stage. I

went to lunch, yeah, yeah, and they're good

dancers too by the way. I was going to

lunch and I couldn't quite find the Thai

place that I was supposed to meet

Hillary and a couple other guys. And a

couple of ladies came up and said you

look lost can we help you? I'm like I can't

find this one Thai place I didn't even know

the name. And so anyways, short story,

they walked me right to it and laughing

the whole time, talking about, I was

talking about my Midwestern roots. We were

having a great time, so this Bend

Community really special, tight knit,

really content. I've had a really good

experience today since I've been here. So

we've been [applause], yeah thank you. Actually it's claps to

you, right? Applause to you. Alright we

should get started. Okay. So I am the

chief wrangler of the Field Innovation Team.

It was a name, a title that came from an

Oakland artist. I wear cowboy boots a lot

like to just have fun. I wear yoga pants

pretty much all the time, I'm wearing

yoga pants right now. I wear them in disasters,

I've worn them in the National Response and

Coordination Center. I even wore them

when President Obama was like thank you

for your work and my mom looked at the

picture and she's like are you wearing yoga

pants? [Audience Laughs] Yeah, I am. I wear yoga

pants and I wear cowboy boots. And today its

octopus sock. But yeah, so I'm the

wrangler. I wrangle a lot of different

talent in disasters but before I

became the chief wrangler, I have an

interesting past and I thought it kind

of correlated a lot with what Jason, and

it resonated with me what he was talking

about with gun violence. So my start in

emergencies was, it was not a pretty one.

In fact, I didn't know I was about to be

in one. It was February 14th, 2008, and I'm a

law student. It's the middle of winter in

Illinois, as you know Jason, it's cold in

Illinois.

And so I'm freezing, I'm in the library,

I'm getting ready for this moot court

argument. Oh no, it was an appellate brief

which is even more boring than a moot

court argument. So anyways, we're sitting

in there, we're getting ready, I'm gonna

like, get done by six o'clock so I can go

to have my date and have a great time.

When what I hear is, I think I hear is,

fireworks just pinging across the street,

but what I can't quite figure out is why

are fireworks going off in the middle of

the day, but in my mind I had to sort of

rationalize the noise, right? Because it

was just, it was very, it was alarming, but

it just couldn't be, it couldn't be

that, right? Well, it was that. It was an

active shooter, a guy named Steve Kazmierczak,

and he was unleashing on a lecture

hall across the street from where I was.

And we were suddenly in the throes of

our own disaster and I have to just give

you a little background, I've dealt with

lots of things like genocide, I've been

in a lot of long-term recovery efforts,

but up to this point, I hadn't personally

been in my own emergency and I had no

idea what to do. So that was the day, on

that February 14th, 2008, that had

changed my life, it changed the course of

the direction I decided to go in my

career path. And so now I just run around

the world going into disasters and

making sure that people never feel the

way that I felt in that library on that

cold winter day. So FIT, what do we do? Our

mission statement is to empower humans

to create cutting-edge disaster

solutions, empower humans to create them.

So my background besides going in and

having that active shooter situation, I

come from a long line of incident

command, emergency management, very

traditional response. You know like if

they tell you to run into an

active shooter situation, run into an

active bomb area, you just say how fast,

right? Like I was used to that command and

control, very, very hierarchical. And

that's what we did. So when I came to

FEMA just a few years later, after

the active shooter, I was their chief

innovation advisor. And a lot of folks

would tell me, well you're the government

you've got to save us, you got to help us,

and you gotta make this right. And

early on, we realized that that's not the

design, that's not going to work.

We're in it together and we've got to

co-create solutions. But it was the

designers, and I'm going to show some

examples, who helped to change that

attitude. They actually changed the

infrastructure in Hurricane Sandy and

the continual border crisis we're having

in the US-Mexico border. Even in Nepal, we

did work there. Designers like

yourself are actually taking the

paradigm and you're shifting it, you're

shifting the mindset to I'm a victim to

I'm a survivor. So it's a huge, huge

difference from when I started. There's

actually a video that's supposed to play

next. Ah, there we go, thank you Matt.

[Alert Sound]

Video Speaker: From the National Weather Service,

a vigorous frontal system will bring significant snowfall tonight

through Wednesday night.

[Alarm Fades Out] [Video Speaker Fades Out]

[Music]

[Music Fades Out]

Desi: So the story about this slide is I don't

intentionally try to do this but I never

give a segue for anyone including Matt

back there who's doing an amazing job

And I was thinking about it as the

video was playing why I do that and

I don't think I had a reason up until I

watched the whole thing. The actions

speak louder than the words, so I think I

just say slide 3 video, but you can see

that these are folks like you. Designers,

roboticists, artists, you know, cartoonists,

others who are coming in and building

out solutions with us right in a

disaster. We're not doing it after,

we're not doing it before, we're doing it

like right as it strikes. So the first

example I'm gonna give you is one from

way back during Hurricane sandy, but it's

a great example of how design played in an

integral role to creating a survivor

centric focus. So just a raise of hands,

anybody experienced Hurricane Sandy? No.

Yeah, it was challenging, it

was only a cat three, category three, so

it wasn't the biggest hurricane we've

ever had, but it hits some highly urban

dense areas on the east coast. In fact, I

had actually never been physically in a

hurricane until that one and I was in

the National Response and Coordination

Center. For those who don't know what

that Center is about, basically when the

president goes up to speak he's in two

places when there's something that

happens. One is he's in the situation

room and he's telling you about a

situation and that is at the White House.

The second place he is, is he's in the

National Response and Coordination

Center and he's telling you about

something bad that's happening or about

to happen. Either place, I hope that

you're ready because it's usually not a

good thing. It's either, obviously, a

mother nature disaster or other, maybe

Homeland Security. So anyways we were all

in the National Response and

Coordination Center including the

President as Hurricane Sandy is

coming over us, and it's my first time,

right? I actually am not from the East

coast, I'm from the Midwest, I'm from

Wisconsin. So we get tornadoes and floods

once in a while a forest fire but not

hurricanes. But this particular example

was where designers took, they were at

the helm. They still don't get enough

credit for what they did. There was

approximately

50 centers open at this point in New

York and New Jersey which is a lot of

centers actually to have open, but this is a

place where people could go, survivors

could go and get assistance. They'd

register for aid and they could go

through the FEMA individual assistance

process, they could go to SBA to get a

loan for their business, they go to HUD

to look at how they can help repair

their homes. There's a whole like system

and then, of course, there's the local

resources as well, the city and others. So

these disaster recovery centers were

actually pretty slow and cumbersome. If

you have 50 centers open and people are

standing in long lines, and they're going

from chair to chair to chair, and it's

taking a really long time to get through

and get your assistance, that's not very

survivor centric. So our little FIT

team said well what if we brought in NY

ITP students, what if we brought folks

from Frog, Frog Design, what if we brought

volunteers who have that kind of UX

experience? Let's bring them into the

centers and have them spend some time

just observing the physical flow of

survivors through the centers. And so

that's what we did. They literally went in,

they looked at it, and we said let's come

up with a new way to do this, let's do it

now, not the next disaster, let's do it

right now. So after they spent a couple

days kind of synthesizing their reports

and their situation and what they saw as

being the challenges, we made these

simple changes. Now this came much later

this nice graphic that was designed

by Frog, but the things in these graphics

were done very quickly. So we found

challenges with getting people

intercepted right away because a lot of

times you would go into the center and

there's just all these resources like

where do I go? Simple thing. Put a person

there to help triage, a designer thinks

that way, not necessarily

an emergency manager who's trying to

figure out how they're going to get all

the assistance out to folks. So that was

one thing that really helped. A second

thing was we got this great idea to

mobilely register people which, again, to

you is probably like well why aren't you

doing that already but we had never in

that history, when I worked at the

agency, mobilely registered people at

their homes. You could really cut down

the numbers by physically going over

with a FEMA Corps member, there are about

18 to 24, and having them register on the

iPad and then upload that to the cloud.

So just really cool things that happen

because these designers rethought the

disaster recovery centers and from that

it just, it made the process flow much,

much better. Besides the Hurricane Sandy,

a more recent example is the US-Mexico

border crisis. Just a show hands again,

who knows what's going on on the

US-Mexico border crisis with

particularly children? Because I can give

you the long or the short. I'll give you

the middle, how about that? Because we

have about half and half. There's about a

hundred and forty-seven thousand people

who've come over the border, the

US-Mexico border since 2011. I think

that's actually a pretty modest estimate,

but that's what we have right now.

Out of all of those folks, fifty percent

of them are unaccompanied minors,

children who are 13 to 17 and another

twenty-five percent of that is kids

under 12. It's a lot of kids without

parents coming over the border. Now we as

a team went out actually to San Antonio

in 2014 and 2015 to redesign the

education system, what they were

receiving when they were coming over to

try to help, see what we could do to help

with the influx of children those

two summers. And our predominant

demographic was Latin America, so you had

Honduran, El Salvadorian, and Guatemalan

children, predominantly again, young boys

who were used to some pretty violent

situations now here in San Antonio and

wondering where do I go next? So we

partnered up with an organization

who kind of looked after them while

things were being sorted out and were

they going back to their home country?

Were they staying in the United States?

What was going on? But they needed some

new educational tools, so we brought in

gaming designers which is really, really

cool. And I should probably just, it's

okay, flip to the next slide after this,

but they design different

curriculum and besides designing some of

the games I'm going to talk about [inaudible].

I'm going to start with what we did with

the robotics piece. So we realized a lot

of these kids were into mechanics,

they were wondering applicable trade and

skill that they could use when they

became 18 and older.

So we started having them assemble

solar-powered robots, we got them

involved in using the arts so they were

drawing out the robots and then we were

creating them. We brought female drone

operators to show them how to operate

drones. We just did anything we could to

get them to think about technology. We

even had a little blue furry

robot that a designer in San Francisco

came up with called romeebo typically

used for kids with autism, but we used it

as a language translator which was

pretty cool because I didn't know this,

but there is, I don't even know

how many dialects in Guatemala, there's a

ton of dialects besides Spanish that the

kids speak so it was very impossible to

have everybody speaking the same

language. We ran a robotics petting zoo,

so I've never run a robotics petting zoo I

don't know about you, but then I've never

run a robotics petting zoo in a border

crisis so it was an interesting

thing. So we brought all kinds of robots,

crawling, walking, talking. We were talking

about disassembling them, we reassembled

them. We brought all these different

creatures and the kids got to just have

a heyday. It was pretty much mayhem in

this gymnasium as all these robots are

flying and crawling and talking and

interacting with kids. But what we did

notice is that these kids are not so far

off from the kids who've grown up in the

US, they learn really fast and they've

had to, right? Because they took the

bestia down from all the way, actually

they've come from Latin America so

they've gone through Latin America

through Mexico and into the United

States. And for those who don't know what

the bestia is, it's their kind of like,

their slang term for the beast because

lots of people, lots of kids get

killed by the train. So anyways, but

this is a cool story because we had

these again, these designers, these

roboticists, these people working

together to coalesce around a robotics

petting zoo in the border crisis. And you'll

see this picture up here by the

solar-powered crab, and this

woman who is this young lady has her feet

pointed towards it because she's very proud. She

combined a couple of different complex

concepts together very fast, having no

robotics experience. So after they were

submerged in

the robotics petting zoo, they then drew their

own robots and her robot connected

artificial intelligence and sensors

and analytics altogether. This is a young

lady who does not have any experience

with robotics and technology and comes

from Honduras. And in the photo that I

wish I would have gotten a closer one,

but it's a hand and she called it the

helping hand. So it's the helping hand

robot for kids in crisis she said, to

help them. So we started asking her, so

why the helping hand? What does it

do? Like how does it work? And she

explained to us that data comes through

the fingertips because that acts as the

sensors and then goes right into the

middle of the hand, and as you can

probably see a bit, there's a

red heart in the middle of the hand. It

takes all of this data, it does some

analytics within the hand, and then it

synthesizes how it's going to help the

human in crisis. Thus it's called the

helping hand. So it's pretty phenomenal

to have this young girl who has no

technology background, having a couple of

hours in a robotics petting zoo, that then

come up with that concept, and then layer

that, the focus is on empathy, right? So

she's focusing on future survivors of

crisis because she's going through that

right now. And just to add to the

pressure, she also doesn't know at this

point, this young lady didn't know

whether she was going to be taken back

to Honduras which is a highly violent,

systemically violent country or if she

was going to stay in the US. So you can

imagine how confusing that time was and

she had such a clarity of thought. So

again, designers helped create this, they

helped create this environment where

kids learned about exponential

technologies. In this photo, it's

important to know that we learned in our

second deployment, our first deployment

was just a lot of fun. We hit hundreds of

kids from Latin America, we had a blast.

And we had to really design for that, but

then again, the design community said

bravo, but think about it, you designed

for these kids but what about the kids

that are coming through now? Like is

there a sustainability plan? And we were

like, we didn't even think about that. We

just were happy the robotics petting zoo

worked out, we were happy everybody got

what they needed done, we were happy the

kids learned something

and had some critical thought behind it.

But the second deployment, designers came

in and they helped us start working with

staff in the administration to change

the culture. So they were now embedding

the techniques in the education within

the system so that when we did leave,

when this little FIT team would take off

back to our daily lives, there

was continuity. And so rather than

hundreds of kids, thousands of kids could

learn some of these cool, great little

educational practices. So that was the

second deployment and it was very

successful, you can see actually two of

the staff members, three of them

actually running the exercises. So by the

second deployment we were there to

support, we were there to help if

something like broke down, we were there

to help to push the envelope but they

were leading the exercises in the

curriculum and that was a huge, huge step

for us. Robotics petting zoo, I kind of

talked about it, but we took it up a

notch. So we got a call from Austin, Texas

and they said we heard about this

robotics petting zoo you did with the

kids. It was really cool. Do you think you

could design another one for Austin?

We thought yeah, we totally can! So I said

yes. But you know, I didn't get the

details to what they were actually

asking for and when I say yes, I'm from

the Midwest, I just go do it, I have to do

it. It's like, it's my word, I've got

to keep it. So a couple weeks later we

get this information package in the mail

and my creative directors are like Desi, what

did you, what did you promise? What did

you say yes to? Oh it's just, it's like

a small festival in Austin like no big

deal. She's like well actually it's South by

Interactive and its 30,000 people, and

we're used to dealing with a hundred

children. So we realized again, we needed

to get our design community to think

about how we're going to scale this

operation to hit 30,000 people. Well it

ended up being, I would think, one of the

most exciting and most

interesting things that ran at

Interactive last year, but it wasn't

without the help of designers to problem

solve very quickly to what we had then

promised for and then it hit a even

larger community. And now I actually see

a lot of people running robotics petting

zoos around the country and

around the world. And for the most part I

see them

[No Audio] [Audio Resumes At 25:27]

classrooms that were destroyed but we

also had a groupon on the sort of in the

the bowl of gorkha working with hundreds

of kids on public awareness public

health gaming so what you see here is

actually right before the 4.5 struck so

wats aftershocks after after earthquakes

typically and and we just happen to hit

a 4.5 nobody was injured no casualty

some people didn't even notice it

because what happens when you're in

enough earthquakes you actually can kind

of create a distant balance in your in

the liquid in your ear and it's hard for

you to know if the earth is not moving

or not and that's what happened to

actually a lot of us but but these young

ladies are running a public health

gaming a sort of simulation where it's

called it was it was developed by two to

improv artists from Chicago and

basically you get in a big circle and

there's someone in the middle I don't

know if you've ever played octopus tag

but it's kind of like octopus tag and

the person in the middle has diarrhea

and the true game they made it up and

basically you have to try and tag

someone as they run across the circle

which for kids that's really fun and

interactive right so as you start to tag

people they become an octopus in the

middle with diarrhea and they try to

take people and the idea is to talk

about tactile touch and personal hygiene

you have a lot of fun doing it but you

realize oh yeah so we exchanged hands we

shake hands if we don't wash our hands

you can really spread this and we're all

going to be in the diarrhea circle so um

it is a lot of fun we had a really good

time uh but it's hard to tell it here I

mean I was thinking about it the other

day it's the diarrhea circle yeah you

know you know that game but but anyways

um so these kids got a lot of lessons in

public health because as the monsoon

season is coming in infrastructures down

you can imagine spread a disease so

again designers coming up with ways to

create public health gaming um this is

just an adorable photo so we we built a

lot i don't know if i can say much more

than that I mean but you know we built a

lot of temporary learning centers

and I think I'm just going to let you

look at that photo and it's cute this

was another area we went to it's called

a hobby Robbie district or each city and

you can see just hundreds of kids have

shown up so another area that we found a

gap in was human trafficking so there is

already some human trafficking that

happens between the borders of India and

Nepal but when the earthquake happened

that uptick went very very high and

people were trying to solve it they were

like physically trying to solve it by

interacting and and sort of getting in

there and making sure people doing

trafficked or walking the kids back from

from the school to their homes but it's

kind of nearly impossible to track

hundreds of kids who've been displaced

and put into relief centers it really is

so we thought maybe we should empower

them with the knowledge to understand

not to go with strangers and really be

careful during this period so we

partnered with a group called circus

Katmandu and we brought amazing

performers into into our curriculum so

hundreds of kids are watching these

acrobatic amazing stunts Devils do all

these amazing actions in basically just

a plus a circle but what they didn't

know is the history of these young

performers they were very young they

were in their 20s they had been

trafficked themselves so they started

this this circus to bring awareness to

others about not being trafficked and

then end up in some sort of form of

child slavery and in this case it was

performance as the child's labor so so

cool idea design performances around

creating awareness do it in a fun way

attract a huge audience and then educate

them in subtle hints and tips and

off-the-cuff conversations so that they

don't become a part of that statistic

this is just another photo of I really

couldn't even get all the kids that

would come to the programming like we

started with two or three hundred kids

each day and it would just mushroom I

mean we would go into a village and all

of a sudden it was like how did all

these I mean do all these kids are they

there they supposed to be in the

building that used to exist here because

there's a lot

kids but we just we did a lot so this is

yet another example of doing Performing

Arts and getting them kind of ready to

be aware about human trafficking the

other really important thing is we

wanted to have that individual personal

touch right so we wanted to make sure

that they knew we were there we armed

ourselves with a lot of Nepali women

leaders so you had these performers

interacting but then we had these young

women because there's a high demographic

of women many of the young men go over

to Abu Dhabi and Dubai to work women who

are able-bodied they came in to

supplement and make sure that they could

hit and target groups of the kids during

the performances so there was a little

bit more of that personal touch which we

really wanted to make sure happen

because it could become just a giant

glob of kids just watching a performance

so there was that that piece going

through the underbelly and then upcoming

disaster preparedness well we you know

we do a lot with design so there's a lot

I didn't talk about but I wanted to talk

about one since I've got a little bit of

time about a young lady who came to me

her name is Margot she actually I just

saw her because we ran this nuclear

preparedness exhibit at Fleet Week which

if anybody wants to know anything about

nuclear I've got great stats it's

important that we start talking about it

this is just an off-the-cuff thing we

are not having this conversation and as

Hillary put it yesterday it's one of the

biggest threats to our nation we've

gotta talk about it so anyways Margot

came to man the exhibit but has a design

background and she's now at Stanford and

she was telling me about her her her

project that was generated off of her

enthusiasm for disasters and how we

could actually make her prototype

smaller but here's a young woman who's a

designer who created a thing called

disaster mesh with her buddy in France

and basically this this concept again

was to sprinkle nodes of mesh around

feels in areas that were destroyed to

amplify bandwidth and it's actually kind

of a brilliant concept because the one

thing that always goes down in disasters

is communication and my best example is

in the Boston Marathon bombings first

thing to shut down when I was running

back in to help set up the the emergency

operation center like literally minutes

after the bombs went off what was down

it was communications because everyone

getting on their phone and there's not

enough bandwidth what happened in

hurricane sandy loved ones couldn't

reach each other so my guys are climbing

up onto rooftops and putting mesh so

this young lady is actually sprinkling

in prototype right now sprinkling seeds

that act as nodes to allow to create a

mesh net mesh around a disaster site so

again another designer who's taking

technology taking disasters she's

applying it into this creative blend

that is going to help future survivors

so we've got a whole lot of stuff going

on in regards to our own disaster

preparedness but one of the things that

can be really important especially this

year I can never predict if we're going

to have hurricanes in the next couple of

months my my prediction was actually I

thought Miami was going to get hit this

year so we ran a Miami do tank with

designers all on gaming around urban

flooding there hasn't been a hurricane

yet but I'm going to say that today and

then tomorrow we're all going to get on

the news and there's going to be like a

cat5 that's headed Miami and in that

case I'll be on a plane to Miami but but

yes we run a lot of things around the

country just disaster do tanks but the

crux of what we do in what I've learned

as I'm truly not from the design world

designers play an integral role in

everything we do they helped create our

framework for response they helped to

develop the disaster preparedness tools

that we use today a lot of the ideas

that are up and coming in our hybrid

with our nanotechnologists or

roboticists and our designers are the

best ones so when I guess I'm telling

you is I'm trying to appeal to your

senses and say that you play a role and

since you're in a very seismically

active area although you're you're not

on the coast here and bend which is

which is great you still have fault

lines think about how you can help in a

disaster think how you can help fit if I

can connect you to someone cool and you

guys can go off to launch an aerostat

project that is designed to help

responders expedite their search and

rescue efforts let me know how I can

help and I think that's really about it

I'm never on time and I've literally

gone a minute I have to go but I want to

thank you for your time yeah