I was employed by BreakAway Games to design Code Orange, a computer 3D real-time strategy serious game to train hospital staff to deal with mass casualty incidents. I gave the project a strong new design structure and overall creative direction that reflected both the core strategic elements and the “feel” of disaster medicine at the hospital level.

I did extensive research on the topic, consulted with many experts (such as Israeli trauma specialist Dr Asher Hirshberg); brought in subject matter experts (SMEs) to work closely with myself; attended numerous courses, symposiums, meetings, disaster drills; spent many hours observing at the famous MedStar shock/trauma facility in Washington DC, and toured many hospital critical care facilities. I also became an unofficial expert in the Hospital Emergency Incident Command System (HEICS), and did extensive client relations work.

I designed a tabletop prototype that covered the response of an entire hospital to a terrorist bomb situation. I wrote the design documentation for the computer game, including spreadsheet-based data fields and mock-ups of the core user-interface.

I provided design leadership, guiding the development team in taking on the complex medical subject matter; boiling complicated materials down to a workable design, especially at the clinical level.

Code Orange is part of the Washington Hospital Center's ER1 Project.

Here is a video of Code Orange in action, which gives a very rough sense of the interface (on which I also did core design work).

You can also see a video of myself moderating the tabletop prototype I designed for this project on BreakAway's homeland security page.