Lab Spotlight: Geoff Hill
Energy Stories Lab’s associates are constantly pursuing interesting and essential research. Once a month, we want to give the opportunity to one of our talented lab associates to speak on what interests them most! This month features PhD Candidate Geoff Hill.
Tell us a bit about your research, including any creative approaches you may incorporate.
My research examines how cities, Indigenous governments, and other forms of municipalities process, retain, and act on complex information for long-term planning — and what happens when that capacity breaks down. I'm particularly interested in "strategic amnesia": the erosion of institutional knowledge and accountability that can lead to infrastructure failure, sprawl, and policy short-termism. My main interest over the years has been in serious games and scenario simulations as tools for engaging, integrating tacit knowledge, and addressing biases and assumptions. I hope to use games and simulations to mitigate this strategic amnesia.
I previously was more involved in energy, working in the sector, but now I am most interested in the collective intelligence (or lack thereof) in policy processes. I believe this applies to many areas beyond what I am currently researching!
Why do you think your research matters now?
I started down this path because I was interested in how different computational models, such as traffic, water, and economic models (to name a few), converge in decision-making at the civic level. But what I realized is that the use, ignorance, misuse, or abuse of models is perhaps symptomatic of larger issues of strategic amnesia, in which knowledge is siloed and accountability breaks down. This became clear to me while living in Calgary and through a better understanding of the recent water crises in the city, which were perhaps explainable by this phenomenon. However, I believe this strategic amnesia and serious games can be applied to many strategic contexts across different domains, such as energy, and at different scales, including national and corporate.
What is an energy issue, topic, or finding that you wish more people knew about?
How interactive media can influence our perception of energy systems and energy transitions. This is a hyper-niche topic, but it was the topic of my master’s research on the persuasive qualities of systems understanding of “tycoon” video games. I was interested in researching how video games can represent energy systems in different ways, potentially informing how people see or understand systems in their real lives. It’s a similar topic to how popular culture in film and television can inform how people see the green transition, except that in interactive media, such as video games, people can get an intuitive understanding of how transitions or systems could work (or not). I believe it is interesting to examine how different games represent these systems and how they might influence players.
Do you have anything exciting coming up that you would like to include?
This summer, I'll be involved in developing a summer school program with Fort McKay First Nation, co-designed with community members and focused on land use, soil, and water systems within their traditional territory. The program will bring together high school and post-secondary students for field-based learning on the land alongside Elders and local knowledge holders, combined with workshops on environmental monitoring, land-use planning, and systemic design through game design.
