Credits: Photo by Stockcake
Engaging citizens and stakeholders in the increasingly complex social and environmental issues of the built environment is one of the key challenges of the current age. Games, with their ability to attract, persuade, and foster empathy, can be a potent tool in connecting the public with our projects, and vice versa.
The Serious Games Seminar is designed to provide students from architecture and design backgrounds with a springboard into game design. This highly practical week will see students identify sites across the city for playful intervention, translate research findings into imaginative game mechanics, and work together on micro game projects designed to connect with the public.
A mixture of theory, practical exercises and fieldwork, the week will leave students with a toybox of playful techniques to help communicate data from, and gather data for, their architectural and design projects.
The aim of the seminar is to provide students with the tools to playfully engage members of the public in either the process or the results of a research project about the urban environment. It introduces tools for analyzing and creating games, approaches to identifying opportunities for playful engagement, and methods for gathering data from interactive events.
At course completion the student will:
Through this workshop, we developed “Clean up the Noisy City,” an educational and interactive game designed to raise children’s awareness of urban soundscapes. In this engaging experience, players take on the role of city problem-solvers, working together to identify, assess, and mitigate disruptive noises using creative solutions. The game is played through a structured yet … Read more
Back2Besòs is an urban game for all ages, where players explore Besòs by finding and solving riddles, uncovering the past, and engaging with the barrio’s spaces in unconventional ways – to learn about its people, their daily lives, historical occupations and their skills. BESÒS CONTEXT Besòs has a complex history of urban transformations driven by … Read more
Urban spaces are not just places to live and work—they are playgrounds for social interaction, historical storytelling, and cultural engagement. As part of the IAAC’s Serious Games Seminar, our team explored Sant Antoni, Barcelona, to design playful interventions that connect the community to its past, present, and future. Our approach combined game design with urban … Read more
This term, we have been focusing on understanding and designing public spaces in the Sants neighborhood of Barcelona. Sants has a unique identity shaped by its long-standing tradition of neighborhood cooperation and pride in its working-class roots, but has faced civic disengagement in recent years. In the studio, our objective has been to leverage public … Read more
In the field of urban planning, engaging citizens and stakeholders in the increasingly complex social and environmental issues of the built environment is one of the major challenges. As a way of looking to attract, persuade, and foster empathy, Quaker can be a potent tool in connecting the community of Poblenou with our project and … Read more
