In the blistering Tokyo summer of 2017, a theater company organized an interactive performance for children and their families to learn about disaster preparedness. A “Disaster Preparedness Professor” (bōsai hakase), sporting a white lab coat and wild curly hair, accompanied by “lab assistants” in similar outfits, welcomed the visitors with exuberant fanfare. We were standing inside a room set up like an open-plan apartment, darkened by closed, thick curtains. I could still make out in the dimmed space a simple Muji-style kitchen, a sofa placed in front of a TV, and a “bedroom” corner with a bed and wardrobe. The professor sat on the sofa. He whispered to the group of eight children and their parents that they needed to stay quiet because something was about to happen. One of the lab assistants began to move around the kitchen. A ringing phone broke the silence. Loud, eerie music began to play. A baby cried in the distance.
The professor looked around, alarmed. In a booming voice, he shouted, “What is happening?!” He dramatically pointed to the TV and a video began to play. An older woman in close-up began to describe her experience of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake that devastated the city of Kobe and surrounding areas in 1995. In a calm tone, she explained how she had to fumble in the dark, not knowing what had happened. Her house had collapsed and she had nothing to eat. Footage of destroyed roads and fires that engulfed entire neighborhoods appeared on the screen. As the film faded to black, someone opened the curtains.
I had come to this theater production with Nagata Hirokazu, the founder and director of Plus Arts, the social design non-profit organization that collaborated with the theater company to create this event. The mission from the Disaster Preparedness Professor (bōsai hakase no chōsenjō) asked participants to create a living space safe from earthquakes. Visitors walked around the room rearranging furniture and objects. They had to correct nine mistakes in eighteen minutes. As upbeat music played in the background, families noted down what they noticed, like dishes that could slide out of a cupboard and the wardrobe that was not secured to the wall or ceiling. When the time was up, a lab assistant went over the answers using a large picture of the room’s layout.
Anticipatory Action
Playful and creative methods like these allow us to rethink disaster preparedness. Scholars have noted that we live in an age of preparedness.1 Rather than avoiding worst-case scenarios, preparedness accepts the fact that catastrophes will happen. The focus shifts to mitigating risks. To do so, preparedness experts mobilize various techniques such as using scenarios to play out possible events and identify ways to reduce existing risks.2 Observers have described how this “anticipatory governance” posits the future as a site of intervention, signaling a new approach that revolves around expectations of what is to come.3 If governing populations had long been about a totalizing kind of diffuse power, we are now living a world where uncertainty is the starting point.4
Preparedness is changing humanitarianism as well. Aid agencies are increasingly adopting what is called “anticipatory action” in the face of intensifying disasters. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) defines it as “acting ahead of predicted hazards to prevent or reduce acute humanitarian impacts before they fully unfold.”5 Since 2018, the agency has been promoting a culture change toward a more anticipatory humanitarian system, and others such as the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, Start Network, the World Bank, and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) have established forecast- and prediction-based systems.6 This dovetails with similar trends in “pre-emptive action” that have dominated international policy and security circles, most recently around climate change.7 It certainly looks like we are entering deeper into an age of preparedness.
Nevertheless, figures show that decision-makers still prioritize emergency relief over preparedness. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) states that between 2019 and 2023, “97% of humanitarian aid was spent on emergency response, reconstruction, relief, and rehabilitation, while less than 3% was invested into disaster prevention and preparedness.”8 Research also shows that humanitarian systems rarely integrate the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, the international agreement on reducing disaster risks, even when dealing with anticipatory action.9 Similarly, the preparedness educators with whom I worked—city officials, non-profit organizations, and members of neighborhood and grassroots organizations—lamented that most people do not incorporate preparedness into their everyday lives. This is due to various reasons, such as the “normalcy” bias whereby people tend to minimize the impact that potential hazards could have on them, and the fact that many people have other urgent concerns such as food, jobs, and crime.10 Thus, scholars might claim that we live in an age of preparedness, but this is not true everywhere.
One of the ways that preparedness educators are trying to persuade people of the importance of readiness is through play. The International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (ICRC), the US Department of Homeland Security, and the UNDRR are some of the institutions that have adopted the use of games for disaster preparedness and climate resilience.11 In Japan, Plus Arts is a pioneer in playful preparedness. Since the organization’s establishment in 2005, their methods have been taken up by the central government, municipalities, and neighborhood associations across the country, as well as by preparedness educators around the world, from Indonesia to Chile.
Playing with Everyday Utopias
Scholars on the use of play in disaster preparedness tend to focus on evaluating its effectiveness.12 However, play can be understood beyond its efficacy in achieving policy aims. It enables more profound transformations thorugh the creation of “everyday utopias.”13 Davina Cooper proposed that everyday utopias are “networks and spaces that perform regular daily life, in the global North, in a radically different fashion … creating the change they wish to encounter, building and forging new ways of experiencing social and political life.”14 Playful preparedness does this through propositions that encourage people to see their everyday lives in a slightly different way, an orientation that I call “resourcing the future.” For instance, with the Disaster Preparedness Professor, the theater production prompted visitors to interact with a “home” in anticipation of a possible earthquake. In other activities, Plus Arts staff teach children and their families, in fun ways, how to turn plastic bags into slings for broken arms, blankets into makeshift stretchers, and car jacks into tools to help people trapped under heavy objects. This framing of ordinary items as potential resources for survival—resourcing the future—also appears in other preparedness messages in Japan.
These playful approaches hinge on a logic of the “as if.” Gregory Bateson, observing animals in a zoo, proposed that an animal’s bite is a playful nip, and not an angry bite, depending on a shared framing or metacommunication of the action.15 For it to be play, there has to be a mutual understanding that the act is “as if” it is a bite and not really a bite. In playfulness, there is always a “double take,” where a thing is never “just that and nothing more.”16 An act can be a playful action in one context but a threatening behavior in another. As a form of the “as if,” play is best understood as an adverb, a disposition toward the world.17 A game, after all, can be played playfully but also seriously; similarly, work can be done playfully as well as seriously. As musician and author Stephen Nachmanovitch states, “The opposite of play is not work … [it] is one-dimensionality or literal-mindedness.”18 Playfulness is an inclination to keep two or more possible worlds in view. It is about seeing a plastic bag as something else in an imagined future scenario. It is about taking the world as what it could be to resource our future survival.
The “as if” of playfulness is also a way to train people’s improvisational muscles. Improvisation gives us “a world that is crescent rather than created.”19 Turning car jacks and garbage bags into resources for survival in a disaster scenario suggests a possible world where ordinary objects take on new importance and children can be active agents rather than helpless victims. And as musicians and other performers attest, improvisation does not emerge out of nothing; practice is everything. Playful preparedness allows people to flex their improvisational skills within a safe and controlled environment. Plus Arts’s activities are pre-designed but they give participants an idea of how they might learn to do the double take in an emergency, seeing the collapsed world around them as hiding potential resources.
From “As If” to “What If”
In addition to the “as if,” playful preparedness enacts the “what if.” Rather than an improvisational flip of a thing’s usual purpose, the “what if” immerses people further into an alternative world. In the coastal town of Talcahuano in Chile, Plus Arts’s methodologies have traveled via the work of the municipality’s chief of the Disaster Management Department, Boris Sáez. Since 2012, he has attended various training programs on disaster preparedness run by the Japanese government. There, he learned about Plus Arts’s activities and realized that it could work well in Chile. He began to organize an event called the Caravana Escolar de la Seguridad (“School Security Caravan”), modeled after Plus Arts’s event featuring fun disaster preparedness education activities, Iza! Kaeru Caravan (literally, “In a Pinch! Frog Caravan”). The Caravana includes modules like those in the Japanese version, such as teaching children how to turn blankets into stretchers, but it also has its own designs. In particular, the modules are mostly taught by children, unlike in Japan where they are run by adults.
One activity that is unique to the Chilean Caravana focuses on disability. I was present before and after the Caravana in October 2023, when a group of twelve- and thirteen-year-old students put together the Sensibility, Empathy, and Inclusion module with the help of one of their teachers. The module included four parts: an obstacle course using a wheelchair, a stand teaching visitors braille, another stand teaching sign language, and an activity guiding people around objects and inside boxes while blindfolded. The primary aim was to teach visitors as well as the students responsible for the module some skills in interacting with people with disabilities during disasters.
At one point, I told Boris that I had read an essay by Julia Watts Belser, who argued that the Covid-19 pandemic showed how people with disabilities can teach others ways to live while struggling to breathe, move, or navigate other restrictions.20 They can show us how to survive a world that was becoming more polluted, more poisoned. Boris then began to tell me of the day he took some school students from Talcahuano to an experiential learning center in the nearby city of Concepción, where they experienced different disabilities in an embodied way. “They taught us that blind people walk against a wall and touch the surface to feel their way, but it’s important for them to touch it with the backs of their hands, not their palms, in case there’s something sharp,” Boris explained. “If we hurt the palm, it could make it more difficult to do things, so that needs to be protected. This is something that we should include in disaster preparedness too when we teach people how to behave during a fire.” He mimicked moving across the wall while touching the surface with the back of his right hand. Boris was saying that disabled people can, indeed, show us how to survive a disaster-filled future. The Sensibility, Empathy, and Inclusion module at the Caravana sought to create this “what if” world—a world where disability is the norm.
Boris has a daughter who has a serious disability. I did not know this until years into our collaboration. Although his professional responsibility is disaster preparedness and management, he is always looking for ways to make his work about preparedness and something more. The Sensibility, Empathy, and Inclusion module is one way that he is designing a possible everyday utopia, where the future becomes possible not only with his daughter but through her. He, in collaboration with students and teachers, is proposing a possible world where disabled people are not only part of the future but guides for it. His use of playful preparedness is a form of prefigurative design that asks: What if the world could be better than it is today?
A Reparative World
Anticipatory action in humanitarianism is still a nascent trend, but observers have already raised concerns with predictive tools. They note that with the emphasis on digital technologies and big data, technological and epistemic inequalities between different communities could be exacerbated, and qualitative and contextual knowledge might be overlooked.21 This disquiet is akin to Mark Duffield’s critique of the preference for what he calls an “adaptive design” approach in a post-humanitarian landscape, where humanitarian actors accept the world as is and avoid demanding political and structural change.22 In the framework of preparedness, anticipatory action can fall into this trap of adapting to future disasters without addressing its core socio-political causes. Similarly, playfulness could be critiqued as masking the injustices underpinning disasters.
However, following feminist queer theorist Eve Sedgwick, play and preparedness can be read through a reparative lens, one in which “the future may be different from the present,” rather than the dominant paranoid reading in social critique that hinges on “a drama of exposure.”23 Playful preparedness can therefore be understood as anticipatory in a prefigurative way. It does not only adapt to or mitigate future events. It proposes possible better worlds and provides spaces and tools for people to practice the art of improvisation so that they may take what is at hand as potential resources for the future. Disaster researchers have found that the imagination can play an important role in encouraging people to be better prepared.24 As anticipatory action becomes increasingly popular in humanitarianism, it will be important to also advocate for qualitative and playful approaches that confront the future through modalities of the “as if” and the “what if.” As Nachmanovitch noted about play, new worlds can emerge when we are not so literal-minded.25 As disasters become more intense, perhaps what we need is the ability to do a double take, to not take the world as is, and to imagine different ways of engagement.
Andrew Lakoff, “Preparing for the Next Emergency,” Public Culture 19, no. 2 (2007): 247–71.
Limor Samimian-Darash, Uncertainty by Design: Preparing for the Future with Scenario Technology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022).
Vincanne Adams et al., “Anticipation: Technoscience, Life, Affect, Temporality,” Subjectivity 28, no. 1 (2009): 246–65; Ben Anderson, “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies,” Progress in Human Geography 34, no. 6 (2010): 777–98.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
Anticipatory Action,” UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Action (OCHA), June 3, 2026, ➝.
Juan Chaves-Gonzalez et al., “Anticipatory Action: Lessons for the Future,” Frontiers in Climate 4 (December 2022): 2; Arielle Tozier de la Poterie et al., “Managing Multiple Hazards: Lessons from Anticipatory Humanitarian Action for Climate Disasters during COVID-19,” Climate and Development 14, no. 4 (2022): 374.
Betsy Hartmann, “Converging on Disaster: Climate Security and the Malthusian Anticipatory Regime for Africa,” Geopolitics 19, no. 4 (2014): 757–83.
“Financing Prevention and De-risking Investment,” United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), ➝.
Rodrigo Mena, “Humanitarianism and the Sendai Framework: A 10-Year Review of Converging and Diverging Paths,” International Journal of Disaster Risk Science 16, no. 1 (2025): 20–32.
James Lewis et al., “Is “fear Itself” the Only Thing We Have to Fear? Explorations of Psychology in Perceptions of the Vulnerability of Others,” Australasian Journal of Disaster and Trauma Studies 3 (2011): 89–104. Fred Krüger et al., eds., Cultures and Disasters: Understanding Cultural Framings in Disaster Risk Reduction (London: Routledge, 2015).
Paula Buchanan, “Serious Games as an Inclusive Disaster Risk Communication Tool: A Literature Review,” Diversifying HayWired Communication Project (2023), ➝; Anthony V. Gampell et al., “‘Serious’ Disaster Video Games: An Innovative Approach to Teaching and Learning about Disasters and Disaster Risk Reduction,” Journal of Geography 119, no. 5 (2020): 159–70.
Virginia Clerveaux et al., “Using Game Technique as a Strategy in Promoting Disaster Awareness in Caribbean Multicultural Societies: The Disaster Awareness Game,” Journal of Disaster Research 3, no. 5 (2008): 321–33; Aleksandra Solinska-Nowak et al., “An Overview of Serious Games for Disaster Risk Management – Prospects and Limitations for Informing Actions to Arrest Increasing Risk,” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 31 (October 2018): 1013–29.
Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
Cooper, Everyday Utopias, 2.
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 180.
Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 272.
Thomas M. Malaby, “Odds and Ends: Risk, Mortality, and the Politics of Contingency,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 26, no. 3 (2002): 283–312; Max Watson, “Games,” in Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Felix Stein, 2023, originally published May 7, 2019, ➝.
Stephen Nachmanovitch, “This Is Play,” New Literary History 40, no. 1 (2009): 12.
Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold, eds., Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (London: Routledge, 2007), 1.
Julia Watts Belser, “Climate Crisis Makes Us Recognize Our Limits — Disability Culture Can Show Us How,” Truthout, July 20, 2023, ➝.
Marc J. C. van den Homberg et al., “The Changing Face of Accountability in Humanitarianism: Using Artificial Intelligence for Anticipatory Action,” Politics and Governance 8, no. 4 (2020): 456–67; Gianluca Iazzolino and Nimesh Dhungana, “Prediction and Data Curation in Digital Humanitarianism,” Big Data & Society 12, no. 3 (2025).
Mark Duffield, “Post-Humanitarianism: Governing Precarity through Adaptive Design,” Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 1, no. 1 (2019): 15–27.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 8, 146.
Joy Ommer et al., “Surprise Floods: The Role of Our Imagination in Preparing for Disasters,” Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 24, no. 8 (2024): 2633–46.
Nachmanovitch, “This Is Play.”
