UtopiaNOW

2017, Industrial Design

The use of games for research was explored through this study, that produced a game that can capture opinions comparing disparate (but inter-related) global risks. Players act as collective decision makers, role playing as a (not yet existing) global governance, achieving consensus by debate.

Whilst there is general agreement by experts on the scale of global risks, there is little or no action on many of them. They are unrecognised in the private media discourse and citizens have highly limited power in shaping the discourse or decisions around global risks.

‘So why aren’t we moving, why don’t we have a war economy against hunger, poverty, climate destruction, and of course war itself? It is not that people are evil (other than in prioritising their own self interest), there is simply no hand at the steering wheel.’

I wanted to find a way of engaging people with this global governance idea, both creatively and through criticising it. In exploring different ideas I came upon gamifying it, co-designing it with people to make global risks, as a subject, less alienating, and disavowing. This way of responding became it’s own way of researching, of physicalising information, allowing others to interrogate it in game-play and conversation.