How can we understand human behavior when their behavior does not make sense? How should we approach the design of interventions when it seems homeowners are living in a different world? Delivered at the 2018 Colorado Wildland Fire Conference, Gregory Vigneaux provides early answers to these questions through a deep exploration of human dimensions following the work of Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and others. Following the establishment of a biological foundation for understanding human perception as "bringing forth a world", he begins sketching an approach to designing interventions targeted at individuals and communities disinterested in risk reduction. Overall, he lays out the beginnings of a framework for operating in the multiverse.

1. Wildland Fire Risk Adaptation as Worldmaking:
A look at human dimensions
Gregory Vigneaux, M.S.
@Gregory_Vig
gvigneaux@outlook.com

2. “It is likely to take an even longer time before effective wildfire risk
management becomes a way of life in the wildland-urban interface”
- Daniel
“The purpose of disaster risk reduction is to create a very different
attitude to disasters and to risk. It is an attempt to...get each individual to
ask, ‘What can I do to protect myself and to minimize risk?’” - Wahlström
“It’s just a natural way of life” - McGee & Russell
(Brenkert-Smith, Champ, & Flores, 2012)
(Martin, Bender, & Raish, 2008)

3. • Linear
• Representational view of the
mind (Cognitivism)
• Forming and manipulating
representations of an
objective, pre-given world
• Objective information is
transferred from the world
into the subject and
processed into behavior

4. “Our knowledge of risks and hazards is
always mediated by human thinking,
language, and experience. There is no
hazard in-itself and no risk-in-itself. It is
always risk and hazard as perceived,
known, and talked about by humans.”
- Coeckelbergh

5. “Risk is neither a feature of the world (an
objective, external state of affairs) nor (…)
a subjective construction by the mind, an
internal matter, but is constituted in the
subject-object relation.” - Coeckelbergh

6. “So, being-in-the-world means that we always find ourselves in the
world in a particular way – we have a ‘there,’ that is, a meaningfully
structured situation in which to act and exist – and we are always
disposed to things in a particular way, they always matter to us
somehow or other.
In acting in the world…I understand how things related to each
other – that is to say, I understanding in the sense of ‘knowing how’
everything in the world hangs together.” - Dreyfus & Wrathall

7. “‘Who we are’ at any
moment cannot be divorced
from what other things and
who other people are to us.”
– Francisco Varela

8. “As medical knowledge of chemistry and
biology develops, disease is transformed
from an ever-present danger into a risk
relating to one's way of life.
More and more of the future apparently
comes to depend on decisions taken in the
present…and more
and more current undesirable situations
are regarded as the unwanted result of
past decisions or decisions omitted.”
- Luhmann

9. “We are experiencing a world. But when we examine more
closely how we get to know this world, we invariably find that
we cannot separate our history of actions – biological and
social – from how this world appears to us.”
– Maturana and Varela

10. “Reality is not given: it is perceiver
dependent, not because the perceiver
constructs it as her or she pleases, but
because what counts as a relevant
world is inseparable from the structure
of the perceiver.” - Varela

11. Color Perception Frog and the Fly
Case Studies
Amala & Kamala

12. “If you kick a stone, it will react to the kick
according to a linear chain of cause and
effects…If you kick a dog, the dog will
respond with structural changes according
to its own nature... the resulting behavior
is generally unpredictable.” – Capra & Luisi

13. “Information has no existence
or meaning apart from that
given to it by the system with
which it interacts.” – Leyland
“Language does not describe a
pre-existing world, but creates
the world about which it
speaks.” – Winograd & Flores

14. “We always operate in some kind of
immediacy of a given situation: our
lived world is so ready-at-hand that
we don’t have any deliberateness
about what is and how we inhabit
it.”
- Francisco Varela

15. “New domains of existence arise in us
languaging beings in two basic ways:
through the distinction of new kinds of
experiences and through the adoption
of new manners of explaining
experiences” –Maturana

16. Propose
Origins
of Discontinuity
Question
Discontinuity
Unreflective
Everyday
Life
Accepted Becomes Part of
Everyday
Life
Evaluate
Proposed
Origins
Discontinuity

17. “The impact that an act of
design will have will depend
always on what feelings it
evokes in the persons that
live in or with it.” - Maturana

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