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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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Serious Games and Edutainment Applications

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).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this piece of writing, designer is used in a broad sense, so it identifies architects, urban designers, etc.

  2. 2.

    List of the software packages mentioned in the book chapter (the developers in brackets): Unity (Unity Technologies); Autodesk 3ds Max (Autodesk); Adobe Photoshop (Adobe Systems); Rhinoceros 3D (Robert McNeel & Associates); Unreal Engine (Epic Games); CryEngine (Crytek).

  3. 3.

    These files extensions are related to point cloud data and present information about points’ coordinates.

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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.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Danilo Di Mascio & Ruth Dalton

  2. Open Lab, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Danilo Di Mascio

Authors
  1. Danilo Di Mascio
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  2. Ruth Dalton
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Correspondence to Danilo Di Mascio .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, United Kingdom

    Minhua Ma

  2. College of Science and Technology, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom

    Andreas Oikonomou

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Di Mascio, D., Dalton, R. (2017). Using Serious Games to Establish a Dialogue Between Designers and Citizens in Participatory Design. In: Ma, M., Oikonomou, A. (eds) Serious Games and Edutainment Applications . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51645-5_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51645-5_20

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