By Melissa Alonso | October 2025 

As hurricane season brings increasingly unpredictable weather across the Southeast, researchers at Georgia Tech’s College of Design are studying how cities, buildings, and communities can adapt—and even thrive—in the face of extreme climate events. Across the Schools of Architecture, Industrial Design, and City & Regional Planning, faculty and students are developing real-world tools to help communities respond to hurricanes, flooding, and heat waves through design innovation, technology, and data-driven resilience.

When Hurricane Helene swept across Florida this year, researchers in the Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics (CURA) were already at work helping local officials make faster, smarter decisions.

Professor Subhrajit “Subhro” Guhathakurta, who directs CURA and teaches in the School of City and Regional Planning, is leading an NSF-funded project with the University of South Florida to revolutionize how communities track and predict flooding.

His team has developed CRIS-HAZARD, a mobile app that allows residents in Pinellas County, Florida, to upload photos and notes when flooding occurs in their neighborhoods. Using this crowdsourced data, Guhathakurta and his team feed real-time information into predictive models that update hourly—offering what he calls “a Waze for hurricanes.”

“Traditional flood models are slow and computationally heavy,” he explained. “They require so much data and processing time that you can’t easily update them during a storm. But by using images and geotagged observations from residents, we can refresh those models almost in real time.”

The project combines community engagement with advanced analytics. Local “community champions” help train neighbors to use the app and attend town halls that demonstrate how the tool works. Meanwhile, a network of 31 fixed cameras installed on flood gauges throughout the county monitors water levels and uploads images to a public dashboard. Computer-vision software then analyzes the footage to measure the rate of flooding.

“We’ve already confirmed what many residents knew—that the same neighborhoods flood over and over again,” Guhathakurta said. “Our goal is not only to predict floods faster, but to empower local governments and communities to act on that data.”

While the initial focus is on Pinellas County, the technology could soon be adapted for other natural disasters. “The app could be used for wildfires, tornadoes, or earthquake damage,” he added. “Any hazard that communities can capture through images and descriptions could feed into this same kind of model.”

In the School of Industrial Design, Professor Roger Ball is guiding students to confront climate disasters through hands-on innovation. His studio, Design for Climate Action, is grounded in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 13—and challenges students to create products that can mitigate the human impact of extreme weather.

“These are what we call ‘wicked problems,’” Ball said. “They existed before you were born and will continue after you’re gone. Our goal as designers is to make things better along the way.”

Recent student projects have ranged from rescue gear for flood response to heat-mitigation tools for outdoor workers. Among them is the Odyssey Rescue Vest, a patent-pending wearable device that allows emergency responders to carry children during flood rescues while keeping their hands free. Developed by master’s student Ebube Maduka-Ugwu, the design includes strategically placed handles that children can grip without choking their rescuer—a feature refined through ergonomic testing.

Another project from the same course reimagined an everyday roadside tool: the traffic cone. Students embedded a water reservoir and misting system inside the cone to create a portable cooling station for highway construction workers. “It’s a simple, low-tech idea,” Ball said, “but one that uses familiar visual language to make an immediate difference for people working in 120-degree heat.”

Industrial Design students Yangyang He and Ebube Maduka-Ugwu—who completed their work during a study-abroad exchange last year in China—reflected on how their experience deepened their understanding of climate-responsive design. Their class collaborated with Blue Sky Rescue, a nonprofit emergency response organization, to prototype wearable rescue equipment using real-world manufacturing materials sourced from local suppliers in Guangzhou.

“Being able to talk directly with rescue teams changed how we designed,” Maduka-Ugwu said. “We learned that floodwaters are highly toxic, so materials need to resist both contamination and wear. The people using this gear put their lives at risk every time, so every design detail matters.”

While Guhathakurta’s and Ball’s teams focus on flooding and field response, Assistant Professor Patrick Kastner of the School of Architecture is tackling climate resilience from a systems perspective. As the director of the Sustainable Urban Systems Lab, Kastner develops computational tools that help cities anticipate how design decisions affect their microclimates—especially under extreme weather conditions.

“We’re not simulating hurricanes directly,” Kastner said, “but we are modeling the kinds of urban and building decisions that determine how a city performs when those events occur.”

Using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Kastner’s research models airflow, heat transfer, and energy performance in complex urban environments. His work helps architects and planners understand how factors like street width, material choice, and building height can influence temperature, wind, and comfort during heat waves or storms. One of the lab’s signature tools, Eddy3D, extends this work into practice—an open-source simulation plugin that visualizes how air, heat, and moisture move through cities, allowing designers to test the real-world impact of their ideas before a single structure is built.

One of his recent seminar projects explored modular construction as a disaster-response strategy—designing quickly deployable housing that can be disassembled and reused after wildfires or hurricanes. “We’re asking what materials and structures could balance durability, speed, and sustainability,” he said.

Looking ahead, Kastner sees machine learning as a transformative force in climate modeling. “It’s already improving weather forecasting,” he said. “Soon we’ll have tools that are not only faster and cheaper but far more accurate. That has enormous implications for how cities prepare for extreme events.”