MORPHPOLY: A process-oriented game for ecological urban models and designs.
MORPHPOLY is a team project with eight stable members of various interdisciplinary experises. This team has designed various participatory models to build “cities” with groups of children. Those “cities” are being built from various simple, everyday and sustainable materials.
The city models are understood as a multi-sensory way of exploring ecological ways of living in cities. The children have to plan living spaces for more than just one (human) species.
Regional
Austria
University of Applied Arts, Vienna; FWF, Austria.
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As an individual in partnership with other persons
First name: Katherina T. Last name: Zakravsky Gender: Female Nationality: Austria If relevant, please select your other nationality: Brazil Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: 4 Hohe-Wandgasse Town: Wien Postal code: 1140 Country: Austria Direct Tel:+43 069919476568 E-mail:katherina.zakravsky@uni-ak.ac.at Website:http://www.morphopoly.org
URL:https://www.morphopoly.org Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgo6w7jG0BXSw18YSWccSAQ
URL:https://twitter.com/morphopoly Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): #game #education #ecology #urbandesign #arteducation
The project is very interested in creating a sensual, playful, highly aesthetic experience for children and adults. We are using the haptic and visual qualities of various materials, we add the imagination of story telling, we also design our own corporate designs, involving colour codes and symbolism.
In our laboratory in fall 2022 (Seestadt Aspern) we created three basic city models, the “green” city with mountains and a river, the “yellow” city in the desert and the “lilac” city at the sea. Each city had there own character and changing building teams, finally growing together to form a gigantic cityscape.
This stage involved also the design of “prompt” cards (designed by Jan Lauth) we also use to inform a documentation process during our excursions. Children are invited to make (analogue) photos to understand the various aspects of city life to be built into the next building sessions.
We have also designed a memory game and a puzzle of the first version/stage of Morphopoly.
At a special event in spring 2023 we will design an “edible” city with a food designer based at the University of Applied Arts.
Thus we are honouring our multi-sensory approach.
Design
Children
Gamification
Urbanism
Sustainability
The project is mainly cooperating with teams of children (age 7 - 12) to build on theestablished orientation towards sustainable economies and life styles those children are already having.
Rather than giving primary information on sustainability, we take this as an already given basis of all our building designs. They are sustainable primarily via the re-use and “up-cycling” of all materials being used in the project. We are working with sets already used in a previous project 2016 in Seestadt, Aspern.
We keep those sets and attach them in transparent bags on a wall to offer them to each new team of builders, children or other. This wall of permanently re-used ressources is a form of visual and haptic design in its own right.
Another aspect is the use of materials found in nature (stones, moss, twigs, dried flowers, spruce cones etc.) and the re-use of “waste” found at building sites. Those materials have been turned into a “diamond mine” by some of the most creative builders during our lab in Seestadt.
Finally sustainable city development is a current theme in the theoretical and conceptual aspects of the project.
We are currently developing a “gamified” model to demonstrated the way how sustainable traffic systems and energy networks can be implemented.
The project is very interested in creating a sensual, playful, highly aesthetic experience for children and adults. We are using the haptic and visual qualities of various materials, we add the imagination of story telling, we also design our own corporate designs, involving colour codes and symbolism.
In our laboratory in fall 2022 (Seestadt Aspern) we created three basic city models, the “green” city with mountains and a river, the “yellow” city in the desert and the “lilac” city at the sea. Each city had there own character and changing building teams, finally growing together to form a gigantic cityscape.
This stage involved also the design of “prompt” cards (designed by Jan Lauth) we also use to inform a documentation process during our excursions. Children are invited to make (analogue) photos to understand the various aspects of city life to be built into the next building sessions.
We have also designed a memory game and a puzzle of the first version/stage of Morphopoly.
At a special event in spring 2023 we will design an “edible” city with a food designer based at the University of Applied Arts.
Thus we are honouring our multi-sensory approach.
All our building sessions are freely accessible for all children and other groups. To provide for a low threshold we offer sessions in various locations,. not only in the University for Applied Arts based in the city centre of Vienna, but also at the periphery (Seestadt Aspern) and in youth clubs mainly frequented by children and young people with a migration background (in the 15th district of Vienna).
At one of our sessions and excursions in spring 2022 we could host a boy just arriving from the Ukraine who could use our project to find a sense of belonging in Vienna.
During our laboratory in Fall 2022 (Seestadt, Aspern) we could also host a girl with “down syndrome” we could provide with a building opportunity of her own.
One team member Jan Lauth is conducting a long-term research on the haptic competence of the blind and visually impaired. As we want to do more work on haptic designs (“Piktohaptik”) we can also include this strain of research into the further stages of the project.
As children are the civil society of tomorrow we understand the project as an investment into the civil society of tomorrow. Our sessions and events have a playful, celebratory character that can easily become part of festivals, get togethers of loca ldistricts (“Grätzelfest”) or any other urban or r/urban social format.
We will work on our website to disseminate the documents of the project. Printed matter (book or catalogue), a film and a podcast (involving storytelling) might be part of future stages of the project.
Finally we are working on a specific game design aiming at a hybrid of model city building and board game – a final product that could be disseminated to be part of civil society, both locally and internationally, and indeed a “social game”.
If stakeholders are understood as organisations and associations contributing to the project, we can name various partners. As stated elsewhere we are hosted by the “University of Applied Arts” in Vienna (and financed by the FWF). We collaborated with various in-house departments connected to social design, research and media. We also collaborate with the UNIDO (see below) and the Film Museum, Austria (see below).
Team members of our team of 9 persons have their own associations with the department of architecture (Robert Zanona, also at the “Angewandte”), an art/media/research lab in Seestadt, Aspern (Jan Lauth, “SeeLab”), a college for graphic design (Walter Roschnik) and the ZOOM children museum (Natali Glisic, Nora Gutwenger).
In the summer 2023 we plan to tour the project through other parts of Austria, among them the “Poolbar Festival” in Vorarlberg, thus extended our range of Stakeholders.
https://www.poolbar.at/
Our team involves persons with the following expertise: The leader Katherina T. Zakravsky is a trained philosopher (main focus on philosophy of culture, history, politics, technology, media studies and STS, since 2016 also urbanistics), performance and media artist and curator of film programs and interdisciplinary projects; artistic director Simone Carneiro is media and fine artist and works for the UNIDO as media professional and advisor; Jan Lauth is media designer and fine artist; Robert Zanona is designer and architect, Natali Glisic is photographer and Nora Gutwenger specialist for participatory art projects; Olivia Jaques is performance artist and scholar on feminist studies, David Kellner is a working artist in the fields of graphic novel and animation; Zanona, Glisic, Gutwenger and Kellner are also specialists on creative work with children, mainly in the ZOOM children’s museum.
The project brings all this experience and expertise together to produce an outcome that will touch upon various disciplines.
Yet mainly this project is situated within an extended understanding of design, involving also the design of communication, story telling, archiving and games.
This understanding of design has a critical and informative connection to the classical fields of architecture and urban planning. The approach of the innovative scheme for buildings and cities coming from the mind of one “genius” specialist is confronted with an approach of a collective, participatory method. A team of experts design a primal design to be used by various groups, mainly children, to create designs that will inform various stages of the creative process.
In the final year of the project we will also enter a collaboration with the Film Museum in Vienna to connect our focus on (visual) documentation to the general collective archive of city movies, both feature films and movies of various types and origins (private collections etc.).
The innovation of the project lies in the process-oriented creation of a hybrid of rather open city building (by groups of children and others) using mixed materials, and the development of a game. Both elements, building and “gamification”, connected to specific methods of documentation (involving time lapse and 3-D-Scans) and storytelling, form the concept of an always morphing city landscape. This urban and “rurban” landscape is an educational tool to demonstrate sustainable city life and multi-species while being also highly entertaining for both children and adults. Each group participating in the process can contribute to the building of the game.
In future stages of the project we want to create a system of using a media archive (of city films, urban models etc.), excursions in actual urban spaces (and non-spaces) and further variations of the building game(s) to inform each other.
As the outcome of the project is mainly a building game using light materials easy to transport, or easy to be found elsewhere, the project can be transferred to various locations and settings.
It can also involve more diverse urban models in the future, thus transgressing the European city it was first based on.
In the future the project might also create new interfaces between analogue and digital forms of gaming, which makes international transfer even easier.
The method of the project is based on the methods of “artistic research” such as process-orientation, collective development, interdisciplinary knowledge production by mixed teams with diverse expertise and cultural backgrounds.
After a period of rather open creative “building sessions” with children age 7-12 acting as “researchers” we have entered a stage of rather strict “gamification” to build a “building game” that can be transferred to various social settings and locations.
A focus lies on “multi-sensory” designs with an emphasis on “haptic” designs (Jan Lauth). Thus the “game” we are building is analogue to provide for haptic elements to be played with.
The team process involves also “theory sessions” with input from urbanistic “classices” such as the studies of Richard Sennett and Jane Jacobs to be extended by contemporary ecological and feminist approaches (from Bruno Latour to Donna Haraway et.al.).
An important aspect of the method is the process of documentation (Photography, both automated as “time lapse” clips and done by hand; video and audio) to render a memory to the always “morphing” versions of the city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCbUOTE4qa8
Each version, model and design of the city must be dissolved and will only live on in its documents. Those documents are evaluated to create the next stage of the research in a process akin to both urban planning and experimental designs (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger).
Another way of keeping the memory of the already “lost” cities while using their traces as basis for new designs is “story telling”, hence the free fabulation of the life in the (model) city based on the current transient structures to be seen and touched.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9vBtFoA_U0&t=13s
“morphoPoly” is addressing the challenge of the emergent global “Mega-City”. As more than half of the human population live in cities, the economical, social and ecological challenges of urban life reach a new level.
The project is working mainly in collaboration with teams of children, as children will be faced with problems of energy supply and ecological transformation on a scope their parents did not need to face. In a playful educational process we provide for model situations so that the children can come up with creative solutions to plan and transform cities that can host not only human inhabitants.
The process has entered a stage of “gamification” to bring structure to the general problems of networks of traffic, communication and energy supply every city has to adress.
Even though based in Vienna, and making use of the architectural knowledge connected to this city (Otto Wagner etc.) the team tries to develop a game and design model that can be applied to a lot of urban settings, even though, given the cultural background of the team at the moment, the European metropolis is still our starting point.
In a future stage of the project, though, we can take the new emerging mega-cities of Asia and Africa into account.
The project has started working as a “PEEK”-project (of artistic research) in September 2021. The project is hosted by the “University of Applied Arts” and has partjnerships with various in-house departments (“Social Design”, “ZentrumFokusForschung” (Center for Research), Digital Media etc.
Three members of the team are experienced experts of creative work with children, working at the “ZOOM children museum”, Vienna.
Since Fall 2021, despite the Corona crisis, we have realised various “Building sessions” with changing teams of children, both at the university and at other sites on Vienna, involving school and local youth organisations attended by both local children and children with a migration background.
In September 2022 we organized a full month of building sessions at the urban development project of “Seestadt Aspern” at the Eastern periphery of Vienna. This new city-within-the city served as a perfect backdrop of urban planning and the imagination of future city life.
The final event of this laboratory involved a visit by a United Nations Industrial Development Organizaton (UNIDO) expert for sustainability and circular economy Maria Grineva (specifically SDG 11). The expert gave an evaluation of the ecological value of the city models the children had built.
This collaboration with UNIDO shall be continued in the final year of the project (till Fall 2023).
One of the elements of the project is to help participants to develop knowledge, skills and attitudes that promote ways to think, plan and act with empathy, responsibility, and care for our planet and for a healthy coexistence. Through our interdisciplinary approach we try to bridge the gap and synergize between various expertises. In line with the GreenComp we are also active in its four interrelated competence areas: ‘embodying sustainability values’, ‘embracing complexity in sustainability’, ‘envisioning sustainable futures’ and ‘acting for sustainability. Sustainability values are conveyed throughout our project in a playful and didactic manner.
The complexity of sustainability is addressed through the different elements we employ in our project ranging from lectures, discourse, to gamification, from excursions to data acquisition. We envision sustainable futures by giving the generations to come a way to reflect in a creative and constructive manner on the topic through our sessions and activities. The project is process-focused, based on various activities such as building sessions, excursions, the playing of games and telling of stories, etc. This encourages an action oriented involvement rather than a purely theoretical one.
