Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE) is a leading Washington D.C. based energy advocacy organisation. Their goal is to move U.S. energy requirements away from Middle-East and other foreign oil to domestic energy self-sufficiency. They work with leading members of the Congress and Senate, as well as advising the president when asked.

Their signature Oil ShockWave simulation recreates a Presidential Situation Room in the midst of a global energy related crisis. They have held the event on several occasions over the past few years, each time with top former Cabinet members and leading business people sitting in to play the various roles. The simulation shows how each possible scenario could play out in terms of American economic and security concerns, and what each potential decision can lead to. The simulation serves to underline how each of the projected crisis scenarios are viable and quite likely to happen, and that Congress and the president must act before such a crisis happens rather than afterwards and prevent America from being in such a vulnerable position.

With the simulations having proved so successful, SAFE partnered with the Kennedy School of Business at Harvard to create a box-set of the simulation for use by educators in the classroom. This ambitious project aimed to contain all the necessary elements of the real simulation events, as well as a comprehensive instruction manual and DVD to ensure that any educator could easily stage the simulation within the timeframe of a class, with students who would not know the roles and likely decisions of the Situation Room as well the Cabinet members who had actually been in it. The MSDS team worked with SAFE to set out all the necessary elements of the simulation and to figure out what was the best way to create them for such use.

The end result was a box containing many different elements (see the relevant spread in the slideshow) that an educator and his class could easily follow and set up. The Educators Manual (on which I was the lead designer) was designed to both introduce the educator to the themes and concepts behind the simulation, and provide the scripts for the simulations themselves. The Manual was printed in two sections, with the front being printed CMYK on a Silk white stock and the back being printed 2-colour on an uncoated grey stock. This both differentiated the information and brought the costs of production on the piece down. The remaining elements (posters, namecards, maps, etc) were printed CMYK on card. The box was printed separately.

This comprehensive set was well received by both client and educators alike, and it has proved quite successful in orders and usage alike.