Using Serious Games to Establish a Dialogue Between Designers and Citizens in Participatory Design

The Architectural Portal of People’s Narratives
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Abstract

The use of serious games in participatory design activities in architecture and planning has received growing attention in recent years. Their alternative ways of representing and communicating information have the potential to make the learning process more interesting and playful and hence more effective. This book chapter presents an alternative way to establish a dialogue between designers and citizens and raise citizens’ awareness of the urban environment and its architectural representation through the creation of an ‘Architectural Portal of People’s Narratives’ using a game engine. The research presents a theoretical, methodological and technical approach. The literature review includes definitions of participatory design and related issues, the use of 3D city models as participatory tools, 3d representations of city in videogames, and serious games as participatory tools. The final part of the chapter deals with the main points of the development process of the virtual Grainger Street (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK).

Keywords

Participatory design Videogames 3D representation Narrative Architecture Urban design Virtual environment Game engines 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Professor Peter Wright and Professor Patrick Olivier, Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator of the MyPlace project, respectively; the research was funded by EPSRC (Design for Wellbeing)-EP/K037366/1. They also wish to thank Dr. Darion Grant and Martin Robertson for their collaboration during the laser scanning of Grainger Street, and Dan Richardson and Jenny Oman for their support during the scanning session. Danilo Di Mascio would also wish to thank Dr. Rachel Clarke for the collaboration during a few MyPlace workshops during which some of the reflections on participation elaborated in this piece of writing started to take shape.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Architecture and Built EnvironmentNorthumbria UniversityNewcastle upon TyneUK
  2. 2.Open LabNewcastle UniversityNewcastle upon TyneUK

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