Designing Accessible Trauma Relief Tools for Post-Disaster, Low-Resource Settings

Designing meaningful engagement for a classroom is one challenge. Designing for a village three days after a massive flash flood, with facilitators arriving on short notice and no guarantee of a quiet space to work, is another.

Alam Santi's Ecogames' Play for Care Facilitation Guide, developed as part of the 2026 response to falsh flooding and landslides in Aceh Tamiang, offers a working example of what education design for genuinely unpredictable conditions looks like in practice.

The starting constraint shaped everything else: children process trauma through experience rather than words, so any tool built for this setting needed to work without relying on verbal processing or a fixed script. That ruled out anything that looked or felt like formal instruction, and pointed instead toward drawing, storytelling, and observation-based play.

From there, three design principles held the toolkit together.

First, low-resource. Every tool needed to work with minimal setup and materials that could survive transport and repeated use in the field, colouring pencils, activity sheets, simple card and cube-based games rather than anything requiring power, screens or fragile components.

Second, facilitator-led but child-paced. Facilitators received training in trauma-sensitive engagement, but the tools themselves were built to let children opt in and disengage on their own terms rather than following a fixed sequence. For example, MuZe Cubes, a storytelling tool using image prompts on dice, gave children a way to participate at whatever level felt comfortable, from simply naming what they saw to constructing a full story.

Third, modular. Sessions in Aceh ranged from dedicated hour-long play sessions to brief activities layered into other relief work happening at the same time. The toolkit needed to flex to both without losing its trauma-sensitive core, so facilitators could select and combine activities in real time based on the group in front of them, rather than working through a rigid programme.

The result held up under difficult conditions: sessions delivered in the rain, in villages already in the middle of a demanding day, with facilitators managing shifting group sizes and ages from two to thirteen in the same room. What made that possible wasn't a single clever tool, but a toolkit designed from the outset around unpredictability rather than against it.

This is the same design thinking that runs through Ecogames' broader work: building tools durable and flexible enough to hold up wherever they're actually used, not just in ideal conditions.

If you're planning education or psychosocial support work in a disaster response or other low-resource setting, get in touch to talk through what a toolkit designed for those conditions could look like. We look forward to collaberating with you.