A Participatory Design Game for Social Housing Configuration in the Context of Manaus, in Brazil

Abstract

The emic structure of space heavily depends on the social, cultural, and economic context (Hillier, 1989). Yet, many social housing projects disregard this crucial aspect by standardizing the configuration of space (Sanoff, 2000). To be able to avoid the standardization of configuration and benefit from the cost-efficiency of mass production (Pine, 1993, Tseng, 2007), we propose a serious game that utilizes participatory design and gamification to facilitate co-creation and enable people to re-enforce their social and cultural preferences in the configuration of the spaces while benefiting from the economic viability of a mass-produced kit-of-parts. The proposed construction game is a mix of board game with Lego pieces. Each Lego piece have different possible dimension depending on the function which is being represented. The gameboard represents the plot on which the housing will be implemented. During the Planning phase of the game the players will use those components to generate a draft configuration that translates their preferences and requirements. Later in the Configuration stage, the game mechanisms are introduced to engage the players to communicate and discuss their ideas, make trades and commitments between them. The proposed configuration comprises fully modular pieces, so it could be easily manufactured and replicated. A test case base is conducted to further analyse on how effective the game has been in facilitating the participation in housing configuration, without the obstacle of technical knowledge of the architectural design and construction.