Spring 2022
Group members: Romina Houshmand and Silje Fridvall Nicklasson
Cityscape and landscape:
– Speculating around possible futures through co-creative methods
How can Urban Futures engage with an audience? And how can we bridge between the city and landscapes for new narratives of the future? In an ever developing world, our cities and urban life needs a public engagement in building future scenarios where all the citizen needs are met in a sustainable way.
The interest consisted in engaging the public citizens in a pluralistic expression, where all the people could speculate together and share their thoughts on the future they want to live in with others. New stories and narratives with visuals were co-created with the help of our board game developed to meet the needs.
Our aim was to facilitate conversations around possible futures and through those conversations provide a diverse hopeful perspective around how we can shape and create the future of the urban environments, rural communities and everything in between.
We also wanted to create a space for Urban Futures to connect with the public and other collaborators, by providing them with a guide and framework of how to begin these types of conversations and collaborations. For instance, actors of the same organization partnered and helped each other like our collaborator, “Urban Futures” and the “Sustainability Hub”, which works with facilitating student-led processes around sustainability.
Methods
We used workshopping as a main method and co-creation between different actors, to design not just for but with, to facilitate participatory practices in framing challenges and solutions. In details, we will use conversation starters, collages, team building techniques, journey maps, role play and “how might we” questions.
Students from University of Gothenburg and Chalmers, were invited in our workshop, where we encouraged collaging around 3 differend future scenarios. The collages and creative writings were then compiled and used for the making of the cards for the board game. By involving the public, we engaged with new perspectives that aren’t always valued in the discourse around urban develpment and speculative design.
The board game “Once upon a future” created conversations around the scene cards developed out of the collages, and everyone had a role-play card that had to follow.
Goals of the Game
- Facilitating discussions.
- Role playing and forget who you are.
- Setting aside self purposes and reach a conclusion with the team.
- Discussing pros and cons of projects and getting diverse perspectives.
- Learning to include many people simultaneously.
Character cards:
Journey map – Participatory co-creative process
After the workshop stage 1 – collage making, there was step 2 – creative writing. Example:
Scene Cards
Story Cards
Game Elements
5 Character Cards Farmer, Business owner, Teacher, Industrial Worker, ChairPerson
1 Dice
5 Stake Tokens – For each character
In 3 themes: Technology, Wellbeing, Species. / Each category consists of 27 stories
27 Scene Cards
71 Story Card
A Booklet
Game’s box