From Awareness to Action : Designing the Metaverse for Social Resilience in Crises

The increasing frequency of environmental, social, and technological crises highlights the urgent need for strategies that translate risk awareness into effective preparedness. Despite growing efforts from institutions to inform the public, many citizens remain disengaged, underprepared, or uninformed. This research explores the metaverse as a novel, immersive environment to promote social resilience in crises. Using a Design Science Research methodology grounded in the ADAPT framework, we develop and evaluate a metaverse-based platform through three iterative cycles. Our approach includes 28 semi-structured interviews with citizens as end-users and social resilience experts, a structured literature review, and iterative prototype development and testing through focus groups with end-users and metaverse experts. The resulting design artifact includes five design requirements and eleven design principles, enabling personalized, context-sensitive, and collaborative resilience experiences. Our findings show that the metaverse can turn social resilience into an active, shared experience, translating abstract awareness into concrete, everyday action.