Public Engagement and Play
Serious Games explores how game design can be used to engage citizens and stakeholders with complex social and environmental challenges in architecture and urbanism. The seminar, conducted in a workshop format, introduces students to the principles of serious games, emphasizing play, empathy, and participation as tools for public engagement and knowledge exchange. Through hands-on exercises, fieldwork, and collaborative micro-game projects, students learn to translate urban research and data into interactive experiences that both communicate and generate insights about the built environment.
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 urban projects, and vice versa.
The Serious Games Seminar is designed to provide students from architecture and other design backgrounds with a springboard into the discipline of 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 urban design projects.
At course completion the student will:
A Community Board Game for Mukuru, Nairobi Jumuiya means “community” in Swahili. My Jumuiya is a participatory board game in which 3 to 6 players each embody a different resident of Mukuru, Nairobi — a mother, a factory worker, a doctor, a kid, a teacher, a university student, a market seller, or a person with … Read more
Trinitat Nova and Trinitat Vella Scavenger Hunt Moving between the neighborhoods of Trinitat Nova and Trinitat Vella in Barcelona, and reaching natural landscapes nearby, like the Collserola hillside or the Besòs River, can already feel a bit like a scavenger hunt. Large highway infrastructures carve through the area, creating barriers that make simple trips … Read more
En La Calle is a board game for 2–4 players aged 8 and above, set in the streets of Bosa-Apogeo, Bogotá — a neighbourhood home to some of the highest school density in the city and the largest school in Bogotá by enrolled students, yet streets that were never designed with children in mind. En … Read more
A Bee Survival Game Context – Bee-Careful starts in Lisbon, Portugal. Where social (vulnerable young community), environmental (ecological unbalance and fragmentation), and mobility (elderly retired community) problematics are adressed through one common medium; greenery. Greenery forms the binder in which the previous elderly community of Lisbon convverges with a new and young community across a … Read more
A fast, dynamic, playful and chatty game AIM: To create a fun, engaging, and creative game to reveal and capture how tweens use and imagine spaces (in Trumbull Hall Park or other Chicago Housing Project). what is scribbly situation? Scribble a situation in 60 seconds, then find what’s similar and what’s unique in everyone’s drawings. … Read more
Urban Mirror is an urban game that turns an ordinary walk in Trinitat Nova and Trinitat Vella into a moment of pause, reflection, and shared authorship of public space. The project is anchored in the urban and social fabric of Nou Barris, where large infrastructures such as the Ronda de Dalt physically separate neighborhoods that … Read more
