Square Builders Tarwewijk Rotterdam Urban Game

As designers, we need to think playfully and optimistically about the values of public space, especially when it comes to involving children and youth. Using gaming mechanisms as a tool for expressing spatial ideas creates a stimulating, well-known environment, enabling highly creative and often unexpected results.
 
Together with Rotterdam-based urban planning office VeldAcademie and several local stakeholders from Rotterdam’s neighborhood of Tarwewijk, we wrapped our minds around making an interactive urban game about new schoolyard design. The game is conceived as a simple “missions and quests” narrative, to define new functionalities of the already outdated schoolyard of “The Globe” primary school. The solutions provided by the pupils and teachers are afterward used as the base for a professional designers’ competition.

type: immersive tool for public space co-design and civic engagement
#urbangaming #microsim #urbangamification #publicspace #childhoodinthecity

client: VeldAcademie, Rotterdam, NL

year: 2020

status: completed