Partitions, Please

Gaming Transparency

by Emily Conklin

How can we imagine new possibilities for outmoded spaces?

Partitions, Please is a gamified design workshop, allowing participants from all backgrounds to come together and design collaboratively. The subject of this game is a large, open, unprogrammed space – like a loft or an open-plan office – that users can reimagine to be a co-living house, rather than traditionally marketed units.

How can we design for new uses, and their makers?

We learn from the past in our efforts to design for a better future.

1. Urban homesteading/squatting

2. Co-living and co-housing movements

3. Adaptive reuse

-- > An open and unjudegmenetal space for debate and serious design – but through “serious play”

Precedent Project: Extrapolation Factory

Brooklyn-based design and futuring studio

Extrapolation Factory specialize in workshop designs; ones that allow everyday people to unlock their creativity and physically make obejcts that represent their ideas and ideals for a future.

Working in the lineage of “future studies,” an elite PhD track, they seek to make these ideas for selfstarting and empowerment accessible to all through a democratization of the design process.

Setting

Informs --> Products

Element 3: “Contextualization” . . . placing speculative ideas in environments where an evaluative state is already intuitive

Element 2: Lenses

IDEA Social Impact

Political Implication Ecological Responsibility

[Idea] A Health Checkpoint

. . . used as metrics through which we can consider the impact of a hypothetical future scenario

Element 1: “Tangibilization”

. . . the manifestation of participants’ ideas into physical prototypes

?

Game Introduction: Who and How?

Precedent

projects to offer context

Opportunity for questions and learning about the projetcs and the urban ills they seek to improve

Game Goals

2. Individual vs. collective

3. Light, a shared resource:

1. “Think in place of others “

GamePlay

1. Characters/ Character Card Career Hobby Temperament

ART

-max light -max vertical space

TECH

-max investment -max meeting space

PERFORMANCE

-max horizontal space -max noise

COMMS

-max privacy -max quiet

GamePlay

2. Teams

All players then share their traits. After sharing, players form loose teams based on one of the factors on the card: this factor for organizing is up to the players themselves.

Global “team goals:”

1. At least 2 communal spaces (suited for everyone)

2. Light must be allowed to hit the “core” on all 4 sides

3. Circulation must be possible throughout all 4 sides

GamePlay

3. Taking Turns/ Placing Partitions

Each player will take their turn by placing partition pieces on the board, using each turn to aggregate the partitions necessary to create the spaces envisioned for characters and teams on the cards. Ideas can change, teams can merge. Annotations on the board are encouraged.

Each turn can place any amount of partitions if all in one direction and unbroken. But only one partition can be placed at a time if breaking a “wall” or changing direction.

Game is finished when all partitions run out, or when the first team completes all their shared goals

Discussion

1. Share and describe the space they envisioned.

2. Hinderances or obstacles players encountered

Visioning

Should your residence exist in a city? Could it? What overarching authority can/should be changed?