In and out domains. Playful principles to in-form urban solutions

The implementation of games in architecture and urban planning has a long history since the 1960s and is still a preferential tool to foster public participation and address contemporary spatial – and social - conflicts within the urban fabric. Moreover, in the last decade, we have seen the rise of urban play as a tool for community building, and city-making and Western society is actively focusing on play/playfulness – together with ludic dynamics and mechanics - as an applied methodology to deal with complex challenges, and deeper comprehend emergent situations. In this paper, we aim to initiate a dialogue between game scholars and architects through the use of the PLEX/CIVIC framework. Like many creative professions, we believe that architectural practice may benefit significantly from having more design methodologies at hand, thus improving lateral thinking. We aim at providing new conceptual and operative tools to discuss and reflect on how games facilitate long-term planning processes and help to solve migration issues, allowing citizens themselves to take their responsibility and contribute to durable solutions

From Smart Cities To Playable Cities. Towards Playful Intelligence In The Urban Environment

In the last decade, we have seen the rise of urban play as a tool for community building, and city-making and Western society is actively focusing on play/playfulness and intelligent systems as a way to approach complex challenges and emergent situations. In this paper, we aim to initiate a dialogue between game scholars and architects. Like many creative professions, we believe that the architectural practice may benefit significantly from having more design methodologies at hand, thus improving lateral thinking. We aim at providing new conceptual and operative tools to discuss and reflect on how games and smart systems facilitate long-term the shift from the Smart Cities to the Playable one, where citizens/players have the opportunity to hack the city and use the smart city’s data and digital technology for their purposes to reactivate the urban environment

Enabling citizens’ speculation: The method of co-speculation for collectively imagining possible futures of ‘ikigai’ in an aging society

Modern industrialized society oppresses human autonomy and shapes dominant future images. Rapid enhancement of technologies adds much more complexity to our society, and it can be dystopian futures. These futures are often shaped by actors with power, such as experts, tech industries, institutions, or designers. On the other hand, recent design agendas including Transition Design and Collective Dreaming, claim a strong demand for empowering wider people to shape desirable futures. Therefore, the thesis presents the method of Co-Speculation as a participatory and experiential speculative method to enable non-expert citizens themselves to imagine possible futures.  The thesis is grounded on mainly two fields; speculative design and participatory design. It investigates how the Co-Speculation method can work for everyday citizens to collectively envision possible futures. In more detail, the research aims to investigate three sub-questions: 1) To explore why speculative design needs to be more participatory, 2) To explore what enables or challenges citizens to speculate futures, and 3) To explore what possible effects the method can create. With this aim, the thesis conducted an empirical case study in the City of Takarazuka, in Japan. In collaboration with the local civic-tech organization, Community Link, the case study explored futures of ikigai, a psychological state of feeling worthy for a living, in the context of an aging society. The project engaged active citizens as co-futurists. Materials for analysis were collected from evaluative interviews with participants, audio records of the workshop, and the researcher’s reflection notes. The research found that the Co-Speculation performs as a potential method for enabling citizens to envision alternative futures. It supports non-experts’ imagination in several ways; diverse views of participants, making as an embodied act, and the empathic scaffolding tools. Some challenges were also identified, such as the difficulty in the suspension of disbelief, dominant pre-assumptions, and a lack of controversial views. Suggestions for further improvements and possible areas of the method application are also presented. This study contributes to the academic discussion on speculative design and participatory design by providing findings and the empirical case of the method application. The conclusion indicates that the method can catalyse imagination and citizens can be involved in the visioning process as active co-futurists

Use Cases for Design Personas : A Systematic Review and New Frontiers

Personas represent the needs of users in diverse populations and impact design by endearing empathy and improving communication. While personas have been lauded for their benefits, we could locate no prior review of persona use cases in design, prompting the question: how are personas actually used to achieve these benefits? To address this question, we review 95 articles containing persona application across multiple domains, and identify software development, healthcare, and higher education as the top domains that employ personas. We then present a three-stage design hierarchy of persona usage to describe how personas are used in design tasks. Finally, we assess the increasing trend of persona initiatives aimed towards social good rather than solely commercial interests. Our findings establish a roadmap of best practices for how practitioners can innovatively employ personas to increase the value of designs and highlight avenues of using personas for socially impactful purposes.© 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9157-3/22/04. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517589fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

A Problem of Play for Democratic Education? Abstraction, Realism, and Exploration in Learning Games. A Response to The Challenges of Gaming for Democratic Education: The Case of iCivics

In this review article, I argue that games are complementary, not self-supporting, learning tools for democratic education because they can: (a) offer simplified, but often not simple, outlines (later called “models”) of complex social systems that generate further inquiry; (b) provide practice spaces for exploring systems that do not have the often serious consequences of taking direct and immediate social, civic, and legal action; and (c) use rules to allow players to explore this aforementioned outline or model by making decisions and seeing an outcome. To make these arguments, I perform a close reading of three examples of participatory and playful media that could be germane to, but are not designed for, educational settings: the early-20th-century board game The Landlord’s Game, YouTube videos advising about law enforcement encounters, and the dystopian indie game Papers, Please

Hyvinvoinnin muotoilu

Designing for Wellbeing consists of 12 projects which represent actual services or processes in the cities of Helsinki, Espoo, Kauniainen and Lahti. Projects address different dimensions of wellbeing, focusing in particular on municipal wellbeing services and patient-centered health care solutions. Designing for Wellbeing highlights new working methods in design, such as service design and the opportunities it provides for municipal decision-makers and the general public using the services. The projects are aimed at finding ways of encouraging people to adopt healthier lifestyles and helping designers and municipal decision-makers to design more pleasant and healthier environments. Examples of the services include redesigning the Villa Breda service home for the elderly in Kauniainen to include cultural services and social events for today’s active retirees, developing the environments and practices in psychiatric care units in Helsinki, reinventing the suburban neighborhoods in Helsinki and Lahti, designing better online services for basic health care and creating smoke-free public environments