Ethnography-Based Digital Communication for Grassroot Disaster Risk Reduction: A Gamified Mobile Application Design Process on the Prospective Istanbul Earthquake Preparedness and Response

This paper explores how Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology can be involved in the gamified mobile application design to promote increased user engagement in earthquake preparedness. Our analysis is based on the findings of the state-funded project “Preparing Istanbul for Earthquake with Digital Gamification Design” in process under the current Cost Action Research Project titled the Grassroots of Digital Europe (CA21141). Gamification (Burke, 2016) uses game mechanics to “design experiences” that motivate people to achieve their goals. We aim to design a mobile gamification application for earthquake preparedness, which can be widely used in daily life in countries in the earthquake zone, including pre and post-disaster stages prepared with the Istanbul field study. Our goal is to create an earthquake preparedness mobile application using a community-based gamification design by analyzing the disaster experiences and views of the public in Turkey through social and cultural contexts. For this, we apply ethnographic research to provide an in-depth analysis rather than a pre-design customer journey query based on stereotyping for the pre-design user research. Throughout the paper, we will examine similar disaster communication media (Rasathane, Tatbikat, etc.) grounded on vertical communication structuring and information transfer by scientific or scholarly authorities in Turkey and worldwide. By addressing the impact of digital inequality, we will deduct the significance of the ethnographic approach as a digital communication strategy for user-centric and value-centric media design. Indeed, critical sociology’s objective resides in de-mystifying relations of domination. We contend that both the ethnographic design process and the gamification of earthquake preparedness introduce an act of “democratization in technology”(Feenberg, 2002) that resists the reduction of the livelihood through technical integration of a wide range of life-enhancing values beyond the mere pursuit of the formal bias for the means-ends rationale of sociality, devaluating the sense of social labor.