Stories from the world of Urban Play

[kqxu]

Privet guys,

I am Ksenia from Moscow, Russia.
I am an architect and urban planner. I finished my work in RTDA http://rtda.su/ one year ago, because I wanted to find out how to make urban simulation. Today I am freelancer and I learned Unreal Engine to make my idea comes true))

One of my big research was analys of huge amount of data. It was Research of small towns in Russia with Philipp Meuser «The development of the Eurasian cities», we made a book about this research https://drive.google.com/open?id=1otSSqM4PRLE4adF1YbFM9EC_rw0N26QJ

I am passionate about how new technologies such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality affect architecture and urban planning. Due to VR, we are able to design comfortable cities in every detail, consider everything and avoid any mistakes during implementation.

I imagine it as a game for future residents who could express their preferences, and as a program for investors who, having looked at the project through virtual reality, would find points of interest and invest money in the development of the city. These technologies are a great tool with which an architect can think over every single layer of a city, make it truly smart; not only at the level of sensors, but also at the level of human needs, fundamental structures, its patterns and flows. It is exciting to envision the ideal city using new immersive technologies of perceptions, a balanced city where all layers of regulation lines, engineering system, social needs, density, green areas, transport, communication will be in order and these layers will not be broken down into pieces in different programs.

I want to research the potential of this idea in order to design a city on the basis of an old and destroyed Russian town which needs new life. Such a platform-program-game should be easy to use, and the user has to be able to see all dependencies and all main points of the town. Such a project or program has to include all rules and regulations, including fire regulations, urban norms, epidemiological norms, insolation and other restrictions. However, this program is not aimed to create a heavenly city or utopia, but rather a refined systemization of urban processes for more transparent, creative and seamless development.

I would be honoured and excited to focus on my passionate and important field of study at your program.

[jakob.wollekob]

Aloha!
Wow, reading through all these introductions fills me with joy and inspiration, but the volume and quality is also a bit intimidating I have to admit :s.
I am Jakob, currently based in Berlin, and am quite new to the world of play as an explorative and transformative tool. I successfully quit a corporate-education program around 2 years ago and am since wandering on “different” routes.

I co-founded a Social Entrepreneurship student-network ( https://infinity-deutschland.de/ ): we aim to rebrand and advance sustainable ideas and solutions as a lifestyle and social entrepreneurship initiative.

For a living, I work as a Strategic Time Travel Consultant ( https://www.knoweaux.com ). We are merging Design-Thinking and Future Foresight principles to proactively create desirable futures (we call this Future Modeling). It’s a mingle-mangle of Experience Design, Collective Decision-making, Scenario Building, and FUN :D.

I started an experimental storytelling and comic blog ( wollekob.com ) after I quit university, but sadly I have failed to really work on it after I got caught up in everyday duties. Also, this is just a lazy excuse I have been telling myself :o).

I am super passionate about VALUES (pragmatic, ethical, emotional) as a compass and framework for human and planetary flourishing. I have been creating spaces for hands-on values reflection and exploration at various conferences and projects, always involving play. We were using vegetables, theatre, as well as various tangible and visual elements to create an impactful and fun experience to tackle this usually abstract theme.

I feel a strong drive to merge my mind and energy with all of you, elevate our ideas through the program and create beauty and together. This thread is already a gold-nugget, thank you for creating this project

Sending loads of love and play,

Jakob

[matteo_uguzzoni]

Hey Maria, Matteo here from TIP: no, it doesn’t close after the deadline for sure! the amount of stories and creatives is overwhelming, that for us as well is surprising, there is a lot of energy and we are really open to the different direction that the community will take!

[Jana]

Hi guys, you seem like some of the most creative people in the world!

I am absolutely amazed reading all of your posts about your fascinating lifes and ideas. And I am thrilled about thinking to possibly be a part of that community – and the possibility to meet you all in person.

I am Jana, living in Cologne, Germany. I am a creative producer for interactive experiences and playful learning. I studied film production at the Filmakademie Ludwigsburg, which is the most known filmschool in Germany and thought I would produce films for the rest of my life.

But then everything came different. In the second year after producing 7 films I had to specialize myself and was applying for one program but hadn’t been accepted. By then I had only the choice between something very boring and: Interactive Media, which was completely new for me at that time. It was the best decision ever: it opened up my world and brought me to explore the whole wide world of storytelling. I learned that storytelling does not have to be linear and like producing for cinema, where you pray for people to go and watch your film. In fact: your stories should be told where your users are and be designed in a way that your users want it to be. And be designed iteratively in collaboration with your users.

I absolutely love about interactive media that you first ask:

- What topic do you want to tell?
- Then: Who do you want to tell it?
- And only the last question is: Where do you tell it?

That opens up a world of formats like installations, VR, AR, Apps, interactive documentaries, board games, and what not to imagine. And of course Urban Games. The best thing about it: your phantasy doesn’t have to stop, everything is possible. What actually defines me as a person very good: if there is a problem, go find a solution and have fun implementing it! This story taught me a lot about the trust that life will find a way to give you the right opportunities at the right time.

After filmschool and lots of great interactive projects I worked at Milla & Partner, a big agency in Germany for Expo Media/Communication in Space. And after that I found an even better fitting place for me: IJsfontein. I am working in the German office of that big Amsterdam based agency, specialized in Playful Learning – that means everything from museums to serious games and trainings for employees. I love my team and I am very happy to work every day on projects that have an impact on our world.

What thrives me most is to contribute something to the world to make it a better place for all of us, to bring people to reflect about complex topics such as climate change and the firm conviction that experiencing and playing is the best way to succeed in that - especially when designing cooperative and team work experiences.

I would love to include more urban gaming projects into my work and possibly also into my volunteer work at Greenpeace.

Side note: I wanted to share with you my belief that activism for Greenpeace is the best and most exciting urban game – but that story would blow up my already very long post. So I’m saving it up for the warm evenings in Athens in October with all of you beautiful people. Hopefully I will be a part of it to keep my promise.

So long, keep up the playful work!

Jana

Find more about my personal projects here: www.janabeyer.com

And about my agency: www.ijsfontein.nl

[Museum_Travel_Agency]

Hello there,
We are Rafał and Tomek from Poland.

We co-create an experimental travel agency called Museum Travel Agency (MTA) which focuses on the intersection of alternative tourism and performing arts. Since 2016 our agency organizes trips, walks, open-air events and performative tours inspired by methodologies of SI movements, land art exhibitions, and open-air theatre. Our motto is Art, Relax, Adventure.

Our urban game practice is based on creating an alternative and performative ways of cities exploring and spending free time. Every trip which we organize it is a different story and the moment of inspiring meeting with people.

We love travels and creative collaborations, so we will be really happy, If we can know new ideas, learn more about the urban game practice and share with our energy and experience

If you are curious about how our trips look like, you can check our YT channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV2JQrabrHSB5vkXzWjhB5g
or you can find us on Facebook under hashtag #muzealnebiurowycieczkowe

Have a nice day,
Rafał and Tomek

[Tasos_P]

Hello people,
I’m Tasos, from Athens, Greece.
Im a web developer and I like playing games. I also like creating things.
This is my music website: www.ettin.net
This is my web dev website: www.ffyeah.gr
I’m a member of team scarlet. We made a game that was presented in amaze 2018.
It was a comment on social, fiscal or otherwise status. Whoever was playing it was laughing. It felt absurd.

[Susi]

Hey super playful and creative people,
reading all your inspiring topics and finding many connections to different people I would like to exchange about but that would need an extra reply. I am Susi and I work between dance, performance and art in a bigger sense as a teacher, choreographer, performer and body therapist based in Berlin. I like to use those practices in non-art contexts as tools to hack normality. Within that ideas of my work are often honesty/authentic, play/serious, non-binary, pleasure and sensitivity. My work takes forms of conversations, walks, workshops, 1-on-1 sessions, silent parties and playgrounds, public dance floors and other explorative formats. I am currently a co-founder of a group of female* survivors that uses art of taking actions against rape culture. I am also a co-host of a collective called woman* making art in public space. I explores the tension of the private and the public space in choreographing different social interactions in the Master in Performing Public Space in Tilburg, finishing in summer. More about my work here but currently in revision www.susirosenbohm.com

I am interested in the tension between free play and very structured games with simple rules that open up a whole universe. Because of my background I live and love authentic relating games (Circling, radical honesty), physical games, games for intimacy and for playful interactions. Coming from a feminist and more social empowerment interest I am also interested in the idea of games for solving discrimination and power structures and making them visible. I am also thinking about how play is sometimes used as power structure and thinking about wether it is possible to create a game for playful conflict solution. I am interested to use play as a tool for civic disobedience. I am working a lot with score and game structures to create connection and trust between people. My main question I have currently in my practice in working in public space is how can I encouraging intimate/connecting experiences in public space that can foster vulnerability that is safe and productive rather than opening people up to harassment or discomfort.

I would be glad to play and exchange with you soon. For instance playing our favorite game from childhood together: My favorite one is chinese hide and seek (I don’t know why it is called chinese but It’s awesome).

Hugs, excitement and playful joy from Susi

[jsenzel]

Hello all! I’m Jonah

I make experimental music based games. Most of my work is digital but I also have a lot of fun making projects that involve physical computing and electronics.
I especially enjoy working on games because they really let you stretch all sorts of different areas of your brain from ultra technical aspects to purely creative ones. On the side I’ve also recently been fascinated by the toy hacking/bending subculture(?) in the audio community. I’m almost done making my first guitar pedal out of a cheap voice changer toy and there’s just something so exciting about completely hijacking and reclaiming the existing infrastructure of a toy circuit to make something new.

I’ve been looking through the posts and It’s so awesome to see just how many different fields everyone is coming from! Working with unfamiliar disciplines is another one of my favorite ways to try and expand my practice.

I also have a little anecdote that felt somewhat poignant in terms of process and problem solving:

the other day I was working on a project that involved small screws recessed in a plastic body, and as I was trying to unscrew one of them to open up what I was working on, I started stripping the head of the screw (it was stuck in there pretty well). So i kept going at it trying to grab on of what was left of it, but the more i worked at it the more i just scraped away the metal and made it harder and harder to grip, until I could turn the screwdriver entirely around without any friction/gripping. Naturally I went to the internet and looked up how to get a stripped screw out. The first wave of advice involed prying the side of the screw head out and unscrewing with a par of pliers, but I couldn’t get into the recess of the plastic. Then came all sorts of different tricks that involved sticking material over the screw head and then pushing against it with the screwdriver to help fill in the gap. I tried that a bunch of times with rubber bands, rubber gloves, tinfoil etc, all with no luck. I then tried to get a “lefty” drill bit to grab the metal and reverse screw out with a drill, but I couldn’t find one anywhere. The research got deeper then, and I was looking into magnets, “screw retreival” kits and all sorts of other stuff. And then, after all that, in the end I just grabbed a drill and cut the head in half, it snapped off, and everything opened up. The rest of the screw was stuck in but since it wasn’t a structurally important screw that didn’t matter at all. I suppose sometimes you just have to go for the nuclear option

[chuck]

Hey everyone,

Nice to meet you!

I’m Chuck, a game designer and artist who’s finishing up their BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. I’m 21 years old and I’ll be moving back to Seattle, Washington this Monday to work and play there for the foreseeable future.

What I love most about urban games is the way they ask people to interact with one another and the space around them while maintaining a level of self-awareness that would not be required were the game taking place anywhere else. Instead of a weakness, I think that the self-awareness that comes from being in a public space gives players a unique dual-experience in that they accept the reality of the game they’re playing without fully retreating/escaping from themselves.

For the past few years I’ve been involved with the Urban Gaming Club at my school, designing campus-wide games for the student body every semester, and it’s difficult to express in words the level of love, respect, and appreciation I feel for both my team of moderators/designers and the community of students who set aside their time to play silly games with us.

A repeated personal failure I spent a lot of time working through was, unfortunately, a lack of trust. It came on unexpectedly during my first couple of games, wherein I was unable to trust players to guide their own experiences and found myself wanting to meddle and bookend every interaction with overwhelmingly positive energy to try and force them to have a very specific type of fun rather than whatever kind of fun they produced organically through their interactions with one another, the game, and Baltimore. I second-guessed my work to the point where I didn’t believe that allowing players to just play the game was enough, and went out of my way to make people laugh and smile because that was what I understood as “signs of fun”. It wasn’t horrible, I don’t think it ruined anyone’s week, but I understand now that it was fiercely insecure of me to micro-manage people’s moods. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with cheering people up if that’s what the game, time, place, and people call for, but to do so unprompted and needlessly (even while playing a cheerful character) undercut the urban game’s ability to morph, grow, and change as a result of the players playing it without my meddling.

Hope to get to know you all better and would love to hear more of your thoughts on games and their communities,

Chuck

[Chau]

Ciao!
I am Chau, from Vietnam and based in Helsinki. Working full time as a professional architect, I balance my free time with self study about social entrepreneurship and a part time PhD about urban space. Currently I am interested in living labs and social innovation, actively participate in Acumen+ platform to study all about social enterprise. I apply the theory into practice with small experiments.
For instance, we founded a Vietnamese Entrepreneurship Society in Finland since Feb 2019. Every month there is a monthly meet-up/ workshop or talk about entrepreneurship. This topic may be so far from the theme of urban game. But I use design thinking and introduce some participatory methods to the group.

Last summer, I collaborated with anordinarycity, a cultural activist from France and based mainly in Asian cities (Hongkong, Vietnam, etc). We curated the first place-making festival about “play in the city”. It is not only about fun, spontaneous and playful interaction, but also the basic needs for public space.
For more details, Vietnam is a developing country with a communist party. Most of public spaces are under surveillance and there is no right to gather without permission. We partnered with local universities, activists and artists. The team was only 3 members, therefore we are really multi-tasking. I tried to host Jane Jacobs walks during the festival. That was such a great experience with playing in the city. We occupied the road at the central square, built up pop-up playgrounds with reused cardboard. I had no free time to sit down and observe properly.

If I have the chance to join the session for Urban Games, the training will complete my practical skills to use game as participatory methods. Right now I am working on my doctoral thesis about temporary uses, bottom-up urbanism and how to facilitate public participation. It sounds very ambiguous, but our city is complex. Every day I study something new, push my boundary a little further. Hopefully I can connect all dots together and make something meaningful to the city I live and the people I encounter daily.

Take a look at :Playtime website. We need to spread the news and mark Vietnam in the map of cultural happenings. The deadline for collaboration is also this Friday, but you can drop a line and talk directly to the team.
https://www.playtime.city/playtime-2019/

[id4marina]

Hi everyone and greetings from Berlin,

My name is Marina, I am an urban sociologist and a visual production lead working at the intersection of urban communication, architecture, art, and design. I capture the excitement in the built environment and urban life with AR, video and graphic content production.

As an urbanist and MA graduate in cultural heritage, I regularly translate my research findings on urban cultural landscapes through open city walks and workshops. Passionate about storytelling and urban exploration, I believe that through the playful experience of the city, its streets and public spaces, we can not only better understand urbanity but also raise awareness, engage, and empower citizens to take an active role in shaping the environments of the future.

Nice to meet you all here. Looking forward to collaborating with you.

[nikolas_kan]

Hi everyone !

I am nikos, i am an architect based in Athens. I am currently doing my master in research in architeture. Game for me is a ghost of childhood. I have a constant feeling that I haven’t played enough, that I was always afraid to take the risk to play. In this sense I am more and more interested in gaming as a process of identity making and a method of collective identity. For my thesis in architecture I would like to understand psychodrama a method of group psychoanalysis using acting practices in spatial terms. The aim is to outline the elements of the space produced basically in its first part group games. It can mainly create spatialities by a visual, phonetical and embodied way. Those spatialities are reforming the connection of the symbolic, the fantastic and the real of Lacan’s borromean knot.
Psychodrama in this approach can be a way of participatory design and dwelling of a space. Through its practices a common space is produced able to “heal” the wounds of anonymity, of non-understanding, of dispassion. As a act of resistance in the contemporary mobility of people, an action of building communities and common spaces (as sharing visions, emotions and hopes) that reform the connection with place in a stabilized and closer to nature way.

I hope we play together !

[MariamK]

Hello everyone,
I am Mariam, from Rustavi, Georgia. I love my hometown and I work hard with local municipality and our Innovation Hub to make Rustavi more innovative. About myself… I am FLEX Program Alumna, I am an intern in American Councils Office in Georgia, also I work in the NGO “Georgian Association For Cultural Relations”. I’m also involved in building the artificial intelligence, I work for platform Effect.ai.
I love Urban Games and working on developing them. And I love playing too. We designed an Urban Game couple months ago and I think its already making changes. I want to get more experienced in this field and that’s why I joined this platform. Our Urban Game is more like a board game which we play with different groups of people (youngsters, students, and etc.). It’s about identify the problems which our city is facing right now, prioritize them and get the feedback from participants so we can pass it to the local municipality and in that way they know what’s important for the citizens. We have some other great ideas in Rustavi as well which I will share with you time to time and I am so glad to get to know you as well!
I’m looking forward to get to know you all and I wish best of luck to everyone!

[Asteroid]

Hello!

What a joy to read your stories about urban games and creative exploration!

This cheerful approach really appeals to me as an upcoming professional architect.
Indeed, an architect plays with the environment!
With good humour and careful planning, we create enjoyable spaces

I’m Anna. I’m doing my Architecture degree in Russia, frequently taking part in professional competitions, workshops, and conferences, like the Congress for the New Urbanism in the USA.

My best idea about Urban Games is gaining “savage knowledge”, the one you can´t learn from books or courses, but only from people you meet and from your personal experience. And then it becomes your unique skill! This always happens in a good urban environment, rich with diverse activities, people, and scenarios. I believe this is what makes the world go round!

Being a Creative Workshop Leader for many years and now doing my Architecture degree, I always try to create such enjoyable spaces and scenarios for people to gain fruitful experience.

So, it will be a desirable chance for me to work with you all in the Urban Play environment and to gather our multiple artistic and technical skills to create something treasurable!

Best,
Anna

[MariamK]

Hello everyone,

I am Mariam, from Rustavi, Georgia. I love my hometown and I work hard with local municipality and our Innovation Hub to make Rustavi more innovative. About myself… I am FLEX Program Alumna, I am an intern in American Councils Office in Georgia, also I work in the NGO "Georgian Association For Cultural Relations". I’m also involved in building the artificial intelligence, I work for platform Effect.ai.

I love Urban Games and working on developing them. And I love playing too. We designed an Urban Game couple months ago and I think its already making changes. I want to get more experienced in this field and that’s why I joined this platform. Our Urban Game is more like a board game which we play with different groups of people (youngsters, students, and etc.). It’s about identify the problems which our city is facing right now, prioritize them and get the feedback from participants so we can pass it to the local municipality and in that way they know what’s important for the citizens. We have some other great ideas in Rustavi as well which I will share with you time to time and I am so glad to get to know you as well!

I’m looking forward to get to know you all and I wish best of luck to everyone!

[Dilbar]

Hi, My name is Dilbar, I’m architecture student from Russia, Kazan.
One day i found myself surching for some activities that i could bring in my home town, that could bring people together, help them to communicate.
I have fiew project that raised the topic of people interaction, how i can design that type of space. And i came up with idea of playfull spaces. I realised that when we all were kids we had no difficulty with communication, we just played together and became friends. We need to be more open and sometimes act like kids. c:
Playing together is one of the form of people communication. I believe that you need to be a little bit kid to openly communicate with others.

[silvia89]

Hello everyone!

I’m Silvia, an architect who is passionate about abandoned places, wastelands and innovative forms of urban regeneration, I worked in the National Re-Cycle Italy Research Project and continues her research on the temporary use of places at Politecnico University. di Milano. i’m also the co-founder of the Na.U Collective, Navigazioni Urbane, which is implementing reactivation and urban requalification strategies in Trieste, Rovereto, Genoa and La Spezia. I’m currently enrolled in the School of Specialization in Entrepreneurship of Culture and Heritage Management. I have been working since 2018 at the festival Port Areas Genova as a production assistant.

I thimk this community is very interesting and I think the urban game can be a very interesting tool to involve people in the redevelopment of places.
Maybe I’m not very experienced but I’m very curious and I’m learning and your contributions are really inspirational, thanks!

[OlgaBitsaki]

Hi all, my name is Olga Bitsaki. I am on my last year of my studies in graphic design in Athens.

Graphic design is a constant welcome challenge for me to communicate and transfer specific messages through images. In graphic design there is always the element of experience and data synthesis. I like to work with rules and limits as when I find a solution to an imposed restriction, I become more creative and what I produce is more targeted. The endlessness of new knowledge and the diversity of cultures are really fascinating to me. Every new project adds to my knowledge and broadens my horizons. I explore new worlds and everything that I create is based on different cultures. For me, beauty, style and design are not luxuries; they are real necessities in everyday life.

I would like to share with you a life-changing experience that I had with one of the projects that I got involved with. It was a project that was based in verses from the Erotocrito by Vitsentos Kornaros and the Erofili by Georgios Chortatsis, works inspired by Medieval Europe, written in the Cretan style and found written on walls throughout Crete. The lead coordinator was one of my professors who put his trust in me to give life to his idea and vision.
We were a team of 30 students and our professor, making decisions and taking drastic actions. We collaborated with 60 schools (many schools students involved) and the local community of Crete. My role in the project was to organize, supervise and communicate with all the people and sponsors involved. You can imagine how hard it was for a young person (I was 20 years old back then) to take up on such demanding responsibilities for the first time. In the beginning, it felt like I was drowning. I kept focusing on our goal, though, and never gave up, no matter how hard it got some times. Throughout this whole journey, I realized how hard it is to communicate creatively with others, to really be able to hear, see and understand your surroundings and what they have to offer you and give space to yourself and to others in order to evolve.

Thank you all for sharing your stories

[dndjamo]

Sounds of Europe – artist statement + project proposal

a project developed by Daniel Djamo (RO)

I plan to create "Sounds of Europe", a sound art, performative and participative art project that shall question the success of integration of foreign elements in Bucharest, Netherlands, focusing on the routes followed by 16 Greek immigrants after the dissolution of the European Union, in a fictional age (the year 2028). The works will be developed alongside a research related to a fictional age, which I have crafted. It is the spring of the year 2028.

Along with a fall of the European market, illegal immigration affected more and more territories of Western countries. All of the European borders are failing. Netherlands recently launched project “Dome”, in which it developed protection-domes over all of the cities and towns of the country. Each city has developed a bar-code system, in which in every citizen is implanted a microchip and has a especially-designated bar-code, which assures safety and full-knowledge over people’s position within the country. You can approach cities only upon microchip and bar-code approval. Once you have entered a new space, your particular code determines your position.

After the fall of the European Union (2024), Greece saw a period of financial difficulty. The Serbian Union became the main power in the Balkans, after the reunification of what was Yugoslavia. Greece sold its gold resources to Poland, and all of its oil to Austria. From an economic point of view, the country is in a coma.

Nonetheless, a group of 16 Irish immigrants have managed to infiltrate all of the borders. From there on, they planned the final act: reaching Amsterdam, where some relatives found jobs for them. This is where our story begins. I am interested in their moment of decision and I plan to develop an artistic discourse from this starting point. Did they survive? If so, how?

My project is a fiction and is focused on creating an imaginary performative archive of a future year, anticipating the results of struggles and tensions that we are confronted with right now within our societies, while also understanding and reflecting the past conflicts.

The constructed fiction of the year 2028 shall put under the magnifying glass the stories of 16 people in the aftermath of a struggle situation, that can also be ending up as a conflict. Imaginary testimonies of young people (teenagers and students up to 25 years old) that never saw war and conflict, will blend past and present in order to best reflect a future, that shall belong to them. That is why I would want to collaborate in this project also with the young generation. They are going to be the force of the project, since in the following years that shall be writing their future and that of the whole country.

"Sounds of Europe" shall result as an performative-archival work, that shall be constructed as a performative-workshop.

I plan to address 16 students and the young generation (people up to 25 years old) from Greece in general, in the shape of a performative workshop.

Basically: we will ask them to create a character from scratch. I will craft together a past story of individuals and their reasons for leaving Greece for Netherlands. They will have to think about a reason and a path that they took from Greece towards Netherlands. They will tell their stories, they will imagine their condition in Greece, they job occupation, their interest, their family ties and the reasons to leave the country. Maybe conflict / war, maybe financial crisis. Then, then they shall craft a story of the future year 2028, that shall be presented as a testimony of the past. They will talk about the character either in first person or either as in third, as someone close to them, which they knew or know. Thus, in the moment of the presentation, they are possibly in the year 2030, 2040, 2060 or 2070. They can decide. It shall result in a performative-workshop and a sound installation of the recorded stories.

Duration: 2-3 hours

Workshop: a series of events (either group or one-on-one meetings)

Duration: 2-3 hours

Place of the workshop: fully flexible

[sinemgorucu]

Hello! I am Sinem!

I am a 25 years old architect, master of urban design student, street art wonderer and a futurist from Turkey. Although I don’t call myself a graphic designer I have also been creating in the graphic design field since my bachelor years as a freelancer.

While studying architecture for my bachelor degree at Gazi University-Turkey and Politecnico di Milano-Italy, I have participated in many international/national design workshops where I got the chance to design different urban games and also a few playgrounds for kids as well as for adults while believing that “play” is not only for children.

Currently I am about to finalize my urban design master studies with my thesis based on an urban storytelling board game called “Co-gnito” which aims to understand peoples urban perception and to create a collective cognitive spatial map as a valuable input for urban designers. The fact that gaming hasn’t been explored widely in terms of its capacity of raw qualitative data collection from city users was my main starting point while designing Co-gnito which resulted in designing a tangible storytelling game where players add-on each others stories and experiences in a specific context and reflect their spatial feelings. It has been designed during my research studies at KU LEUVEN-Belgium and currently being tested at Middle East Technical University-Turkey. Serious gaming especially in the field of urban studies is my major research interest which I am willing to build my professional carreer on while I am also highly interested in educational shildren board games focusing on gender equality in terms of societal mission stereotypes or profession selection. By September 2019 I will finalize my thesis studies in Turkey and start my second masters degree at University College London.

Besides my academic background, I have a special interest on street art and for some years now, have been travelling to see and document street art works around the world. One of my biggest goals is creating an AR based game on street art works.

It was really nice to read all of your stories

Best wishes from Turkey!
With love,
Sinem