Credits: Photo by Stockcake

Description

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.

Learning Objectives

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:

• Learn how to critically differentiate games and gameplay.
• Understand and apply basic elements of game design in pursuit of ‘serious’ outcomes.
• Recognize the importance of interaction to public engagement.
• Learn how to employ different documentation techniques for interactive events.
• Develop and iterate on a playable outcome for an element or site of their research.