Bridgette Engeler (left) and Kirsten Day hosting a workshop at Melbourne Knowledge Week | Image: the Bureau
Design academics at the hosted multiple events and activations at (MKW) this year.
Responding to the MKW brief asking “So what if…?”, one Swinburne response was to create a game scenario exploring the impact of our actions in regards to sustainability.
Led by Course Director of Master of Design, Bridgette Engeler, and Course Director of Interior Architecture, Dr Kirsten Day in partnership with a team of designers and developers at , a Telstra agency and the City of Melbourne – the team created .
“Our first project for MKW was a ConseQuest game or ‘consequence generator’, that asks ‘So what if…?’ and links to the MKW theme. We looked at sustainability issues that are an important focus for the team at the Smart Cities Research Institute,” says Dr Day.
“By looking at what happens when someone throws a cigarette butt onto the street and how it doesn’t biodegrade, we imagined a war games scenario where one action or decision triggers a series of consequences,” she says.
“We considered network mapping and the places a cigarette butt ends up in the environment – in a bin, drain, or placed into a bottle or tin. We also looked at plastics, fast fashion and electronic devices and how they’re recycled and disposed of. We looked at how we design objects with this in mind,” she explains.
Dr Day and Ms Engeler wrote the content and created the animation. The project was commissioned by the City of Melbourne.
“Readify were integral to the project and suggested we develop a game to engage people to make it fun,” says Dr Day.
From a MKW podium people chose the game they wanted to play on a large screen. A ‘Ninja Chick’ game character took them on a cigarette butt, fast fashion, electronic device or plastic object journey in a 2-minute game sequence. Network mapping of game scenarios linked to QR codes gave access to scenario information.
The Ninja Chick game character developed by Readify
From digital games to the not-so-humble kitchen. Swinburne academics – Dr Day, Ms Engeler, Professor Mark Taylor, Chair of Architectural and Industrial Design and Jeni Paay, Associate Professor in Interaction Design – showed the kitchen as a cultural space in MKW Kitchen Narratives (Towards Melbourne
