Participatory Design of Digital Crisis Management Training

Abstract

The integration of digital tools into crisis management training is essential for preparing students and practitioners to respond effectively to increasingly complex environments. Current crises typically involve actors across regions and nations, and scenarios that require collaboration between different sectors and departments. Budget and time constraints, as well as environmental concerns, make it difficult to organize frequent, large-scale exercises across borders and sectors. To prepare for this, we need to create digital environments for synchronous training exercises.

In this paper, we present the TeleTraining in Crisis Management project. We report on a participatory, cross-national design process for developing a digital system that supports realistic, interactive crisis exercises. Through a user-centred 2-day ideation workshop involving 16 participants from three countries, key learning and operational needs were identified, and the next step is to use this input to design a learning management system for exercises, test and evaluate.