This participatory platform enables students to participate in designing a new student dormitory. How do students want to live? They can play an online game, submit their innovative ideas, or write their comments in a text format. It was implemented for a new student dormitory in the city district of Altona, Hamburg, Germany.
This participatory platform offers a novel concept; it diversifies the participatory options and offers three different participatory options. The users can choose among playing a game, submitting their ideas and suggestions or writing their comments. With the diversification of the participatory offers on one single platform we aim at reaching different citizens with a variety of their skills and preferred expression and participatory tools. The platform focuses on the development of a concept for a student dormitory and explores how students live and how would they like to live, study, sleep and party in a student dormitory.
The student/player can play a game; through the game she can express her wishes and habits related to the design of her own room and the facilities in the student dormitory. The game displays the layout of the student dormitory and a student´s room. The student gets random cards with descriptions of activities and functionalities and can place those cards either in the room, in the student dormitory or in the environment surrounding the dormitory. The placement of the card indicates the preferred locations for these activities and functionalities. When finished playing, the student can submit his suggestion to the platform and with this contribute to the design of the new dormitory.
Other two options include submitting suggestions and ideas and writing comments. The suggestions can be submitted with the help of an online questionnaire which helps to describe all ideas in the same way. These ideas are then presented as an online suggestion board and can be viewed and commented by other users. The comments can be written in a text form and sent online.
The platform was first tested with the students from Hamburg; more than 400 students participated in the survey. The results were used by the DWI architects – a private company responsible for the designing the inner architecture of the student dormitory.
“Have a say in the design process of your new student accommodation. Play the game and submit your ideas now!”
GeoGames Lab 